An investigation into the adoption and adaptation of the English loan words swap and spread in Romanian and Polish translations of economic documents

Abstract

This paper identifies strategies for the adoption and adaptation of English loan words in economic documents translated from English into Polish and Romanian at the European Central Bank (ECB), using the terms swap and spread as examples. The economic vocabulary in the Polish and Romanian languages is much less developed than in English, the international language of finance and economics. Therefore, new European terms related to capitalism and the market economy pose a challenge to translators. Polish and Romanian tend to borrow English economic terms due to their novelty and the lack of a well-established economic vocabulary in these two languages. Creative, morphological adaptation is also employed in both languages, as are additional, explanatory words. However, Polish seems to be slightly more conservative – rather than adopting the English term, the Polish language versions contain more instances of the term spread being translated into Polish.