doi.org/10.15178/va.2017.141.155-157

REVIEW

CURRENT APPROACHES TO BUSINESS AND INSTITUTIONAL TRANSLATION
Daniel Gallego Herández (ed.)
Bern: Peter Lang, 2015

Elena Alcalde-Peñalver¹

¹University of Burgos. Spain

Correspondence: Elena Alcalde Peñalver. eapenalver@ubu.es

The work Current Approaches to Business and Institutional Translation, edited by Daniel Gallego-Hernandez, is a new compendium of the main contributions of the conference on economic, trade, financial and institutional translation held at the University of Alicante in May 2014. The work is of interest to translators who are starting out in these fields of specialization, experienced translators, teachers and researchers, as it provides practical information on terminological issues that may be difficult to address, practical advice to achieve a higher level of specialization and with different types of clients (financial entities, public institutions, international organizations), and research and work methodologies that can be adopted for future studies.
In addition, it is interesting to mention that it is not limited to a single linguistic combination, but the articles address issues about translation from English, French, Portuguese and German to Spanish, and even Romanian-English, and from its academic and professional perspective in different countries.
We can classify the different articles of the book in five thematic areas that we will detail below: translation practice, translation in the tourist field, specialized terminology, specialized translation didactics and multilingualism.
The first part has a more practical approach and focuses on issues such as specialization in financial translation from the experience of an internal translator in a financial institution, translation in international organizations in the case of freelance translators, the challenges of sworn translation depending of the function of the text or the recipient and, finally, questions about the translation of sustainability reports through a corpus study.
The second part focuses on translation in the tourism field and in advertising campaigns. This activity has a great economic impact on many countries and, nevertheless, translation of advertising campaigns or messages of importance to tourists continues to have big gaps in terms of quality level. In many cases cultural references and other information necessary for tourists do not get transmitted or are conveyed in the wrong way, which, as quoted by Flores García in his article, entail for e-tourism estimated losses totaling 120 million euros.
The third part focuses on terminological aspects of economic translation from corpus studies. For this purpose, we found an article about a research project carried out between the University of Vigo and the University of Sao Paulo, which studied the terminological evolution and the appearance of new concepts and their respective neologisms. They served to denominate non-existent realities in many countries before their appearance in the USA. in the years of the economic crisis. Another article focuses on the practice of translation at the European Central Bank with a special interest in translation of metaphorical expressions. The article by professors Barceló Martínez and Delgado Pugés focuses on the use the market language makes of metaphors in journalistic texts in French from the specialized press. The next article in this part focuses on the language of real-estate sector in Spanish and French as a result of the economic crisis through a study of corpus of texts from the newspapers El País and Le Monde. Yasmine Barsoum’s article is about the role terminology plays in specialized translation through a corpus study of texts taken from the website of several large companies such as Dell, Microsoft or Nestlé. This corpus helps the author to study the terminological variation and establish the use of one term against another. The last article in this part carried out a study of the written discourse of the theorist of the Global Systemic Crisis and Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, by analyzing his work Finish with This Crisis. The author of the article makes a study of the most peculiar features of the author’s style and the difficulties its translation entails. It is a style with numerous neologisms, metaphors and other rhetorical figures that, even though they are not technicalities, entail great translation challenges when it comes to adapting them to our language.
The fourth part deals with issues of didactics of specialized translation. The first article involves a reflection on the teaching of reverse translation and the challenges it poses to the teacher, especially if the teacher is not a specialist in the subject, and it presents real practical examples. The following study describes an analysis of translation errors of undergraduate students in economic translation subjects from English and French to Spanish, with the aim of providing practical advice for the teaching of these subjects. The article by Bibiana Clavijo focuses on the didactics of translation in business languages in Colombia based on the specific needs of this country and the panorama of translation in it. Another article analyzes the role of technology and the new existing tools in the field of translation when preparing students for the labor market in the case of Poland. The study starts from the idea of creating a bilingual Polish-Spanish dictionary of linguistic texts for a machine translation system. The following article also focuses on the case of a Polish university in which, in an English study program, business English, with certain translation contents, is taught. The author’s research analyzes the use of technology in these studies and the need for translators in the field of specialty of business to use it to do their work.
The last two chapters describe the challenges of multilingualism today, the first from the perspective of companies and the second from that of the European institutions, and what it implies when translating.
We consider that this work to be a contribution of interest to an area that increasingly captures the attention of researchers, since the demand for the specialties deal with in it is in great demand today. It is also worth highlighting the great variety of topics that are included, as well as the different perspectives from which they are addressed. Therefore, we can conclude affirming that we recommend the consultation of this work for all those who want to continue discovering new theoretical, practical and methodological aspects of economic, financial, tourist and institutional translation.