What museums in New York City (do not) translate into Spanish: a corpus-based study

Abstract

Museum texts play a critical role in the discourse that accompanies any given artifact, exhibition or museum. In the case of museum text translation, some relevant contributions have appeared in recent years; however, some scholars suggest that this is a field of study that still needs to be further developed. This paper focuses on several aspects of museum text translation based on a descriptive analysis of records found on websites from 26 museums in New York City. By analyzing the corpus, which has been essentially compiled in two periods (2016 and 2020), we notice a word increase of 40% within this four-year period. As for the types of texts that are more frequent in the corpus, educational resources are at the top of the list, followed by press releases and texts informing about parallel activities. There is also a tendency for translating texts related to temporary exhibitions, as compared to texts on the museums’ collections, which are scarce in the corpus. Lastly, in the light of the generalized museum closure in mid-March 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it is noticed that just a few of the museums’ websites inform visitors of the closure by using the Spanish language.