Between Two Languages: Tourism Terminology in Albanian and English Based on a Comparative Corpus Analysis

This article examines Albanian-English tourism terminology through a purpose-built corpus of 300 term pairs drawn from professional tourism communication produced or circulated between 2018 and 2025. It addresses the still limited systematic treatment of Albanian tourism terminology in bilingual and digital contexts and analyzes the data by structural type, semantic field, terminological relation, and translation strategy. The results show that both languages rely heavily on multi-word terminology, although Albanian has more units composed of three or more words (26.7%) than English (14.0%), while English more often compresses concepts into single-word or two-word forms. Eight semantic fields are analyzed, with Cultural Heritage and Destination forming the largest group. Six translation strategies are identified: calque, functional equivalence, direct borrowing, descriptive translation, hybrid formation, and cultural substitution. The findings show that Albanian combines international borrowing with productive native patterns, especially the turizëm (Eng. tourism) + modifier pattern, while culture-bound terms such as han (Eng. inn), bujtinë (Eng. guesthouse), pritje tradicionale (Eng. traditional welcome), and rrugë panoramike (Eng. scenic route) require contextual interpretation. The study contributes a functional taxonomy of Albanian-English terminological correspondence and supports a standardized bilingual tourism glossary for translation, tourism education, destination marketing, and digital tourism communication.