ABSTRACT
The status of English as an international language means that in language learning and translational contexts it has become a moving target. Within translational contexts the issue is especially relevant to translations into English where the envisaged readership is international. This paper discusses issues which arise from translations of Italian tourist texts into English submitted by a group of advanced-level Italian university students. Translation of this nature entails a transition from the local to the global for the benefit of mostly non-native speakers of English, but such a shift is not without complications. One of these is that from an early age Italian students are nurtured on Standard British English and that codified target-language parameters are easily accessed for Standard British English, but not for English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). At the same time, knee-jerk insistence on a major variety of English has its pitfalls; the translator must be sensitive to the fact that the envisaged target readers, extremely heterogeneous on account of their vastly different levels of linguistic and cultural competence, may read off diverse meanings from a single text, or at least react to it in diverse ways. The second half of the paper provides a range of examples of student translations into English for an envisaged international readership.
