The lexicographical treatment of idioms in business dictionaries from the point of view of the translator as user

Esther Fraile Vicente

doi:10.7146/hjlcb.v21i40.96788

Abstract

Economic language presents a hybrid nature. Unlike other LSPs, this discourse shows a high degree of emotive meaning, abstract processes like metaphor, which bring about the great number of idioms used in business English, and the complexity involved in their translation into Spanish. The analysis of the lexicographical treatment of ﬁve business idioms in nineteen dictionaries of economics (monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual) reveals that specialized lexicographical resources should improve their treatment of idioms and other phraseological units if they are to respond to the needs of users like translators. It is suggested that specialized works should include idioms as lemmas, offer more types of syntactic-semantic information and structure it more systematically, for example, by basing their entries on the conceptual structure of economy.

Highlights

This article is part of a broader study (Fraile Vicente 2005) where I explored the treatment of business idioms1 in general and specialized lexicographical resources and systems of terminology management
In the analysis of the microstructure, I checked if the different types of phraseological units are identified with the corresponding syntagmatic label; the lemmatization criteria used with idioms; if the idiom is offered with orthographic variants, grammatical indications, examples of use, pragmatic information; if the translation equivalents proposed are correct
At the beginning of each volume, there is a list of the entries and cross-references, and the final analytic index includes the total number of articles and information on essential economic concepts that are not contemplated in the dictionary.This classical work neglects phraseological information as, it does not include any of the idioms studied: bear market, blue chip, gilt-edged value, talk shop and sleeping partner

Summary

Introduction

This article is part of a broader study (Fraile Vicente 2005) where I explored the treatment of business idioms in general and specialized lexicographical resources and systems of terminology management (dictionaries, glossaries, terminological databases). In the analysis of the microstructure (the internal organization of articles), I checked if the different types of phraseological units are identified with the corresponding syntagmatic label; the lemmatization criteria used with idioms (whether these units appear as an independent entry or as run-ons inside the article of one of its lexical components); if the idiom is offered with orthographic variants, grammatical indications, examples of use, pragmatic information (synonyms, antonyms, cross-references and other semantically-related terms); if the translation equivalents proposed are correct (whether it is indicated, for example, that a figurative expression has a near-equivalent in the target language or it can only be transferred with a paraphrase). I offer some general traits on the character of each dictionary based on the peculiarities set forth in their introductions and backcovers in order to verify to what extent the reality of the book responds to the qualities announced

Results and Discussion

11 The CD-ROM version also contains

Conclusions