When italians talk 'business' they mean it

Abstract

In business Italian the use of anglicisms is characterised by two main features. One is the growing proportion of non-adapted versus adapted loan words, the other is the significant role played by the media in introducing anglicisms into the Italian vocabulary. Translator trainees are often faced with the problem of identifying the correct contexts in which an English lexical item can be translated with an anglicism in Italian, particularly with polysemic words whose respective range of meanings in the source and target language tend to differ, as revealed by the definitions contained in monolingual dictionaries (Laviosa, 2003). An additional difficulty is that the context provided in the target language is either very limited or non existent (see for example Grande dizionario italiano, De Mauro, 2000; or Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Zingarelli, 2003, respectively). The present study adopts a corpus-driven and a corpus-based approach to investigate the use of the lemma ‘business’ in an Italian-English comparable corpus of business language (COMIC-SALCA), as a first step towards a fuller analysis of this term as a functionally-complete unit of meaning (Tognini-Bonelli 1996a/b; 2000, 2001). The aim is descriptive and pedagogic.