Offizielle touristische Websites im Deutschen und Italienischen – eine kontrastive Studie

This article investigates Official Tourism Websites (OTW) in Germany and Italy that were commissioned by a regional authority with the goal of promoting the respective destination for tourism. Their intention is to inspire the OTWs’ visitors to visit the destination. In this paper, the OTW is considered a hypertext genre, that is, a coherent, thematically oriented multimodal entity which has an evident communicative function within a specific situational context. The comparison between German and Italian OTWs is carried out within the framework of Contrastive Textology, whose subject is parallel texts – in this case, parallel hypertexts –, which are not translated texts but are comparable with regard to thematic and pragmatic aspects (Spillner 1981, 241). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate, from a communicative-functional perspective, the multimodal interaction between text and image in the destinationʼs image-building realised in German and Italian OTWs, focusing on common features and differences of selected aspects. The analysis takes into account the communication conditions, the macrostructure, the text-image relationship, as well as linguistic and stylistic features of web pages containing “presentation texts” and “background texts”.