The relationship between the typical errors in the translation of business idioms and their lexicographical treatment

Abstract

This essay is based on the complexity involved in the translation of English business idioms into Spanish, due to the fact that these linguistic constructions are created with metaphors and based on associations of meaning that have not yet been studied sufficiently. By performing a translation experiment with my students, some conclusions are drawn regarding the difficulties inexperienced translators face and how dictionaries should cope with them. It is suggested that, most general and specialized dictionaries do not offer exact translation equivalents for idioms, but present versions that either belong to a different language level, show a lost of semantic content, have a different frequency, are archaic or erroneous. To solve these limitations, the lexicographical resources should not only include idioms as lemmas, but also offer more syntactic-semantic information with them and to structure it more systematically.

‘Beyond the Grave’: Equivalence of Specialized Phraseological Units Containing Dead Metaphors in an English-Spanish Dictionary of Commerce and Economics

“…However, she asserts that lsp phraseology is an under-explored and non-institutionalized line of research, to the point of considering it a non-coherent research field (Kjaer, 2007, p. 507). Nonetheless, during the last two decades, scholars have been studying lsp exhaustively with the goal of offering descriptive and statistical information about the behavior of lsp phraseology both in corpora and in lexicographic resources (Aguado de Cea, 2007;Bevilacqua, 2004;Buendía Castro & Faber, 2015;Fraile Vicente, 2007;Hourani-Martín & Tabares-Plasencia, 2020;Kübler & Pecman, 2012;L'Homme & Bertrand, 2009;Lorente, 2002;Montero Martínez, 2008).…”

The Translation of Lexicalized Metaphors in Interlinguistic and Intercultural Communication of Financial Security Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis of English and Spanish Texts about Money Laundering

“…There have been many conceptual domains examined in previous research. For example, Fraile Vicente (2007) presents diverse general conceptual domains that provide grounds for a breadth of metaphorical expression. She distinguishes between conceptual metaphors such as the economy is a machine, a liquid, a human body, daily life, nature, a game, a conflict or war, and competition.…”