Initialisms, acronyms and abbreviations in specialized texts of Spanish and German economic written media

Abstract

The main aim of this work is to perform a contrastive analysis on the acronyms and abbreviations of the language of economics in Spanish and German, with the aid of a comparable corpus of economic news published in the specialised press in both countries. The 2007 economic crisis is the thematic basis of this corpus study, whose texts encompass the period up until 2015. Acronyms are a characteristic resource of the language of economics and serve to streamline it by reducing the length of words, the names of institutions, etc., which are much longer in their normal format. However, instead of contributing to conceptual understanding, the opposite often occurs, since the message is coded and, therefore, impedes this. It is possible to observe a relationship between the language of economy (which encourages this shortening) and its terminological density (the greater the number of acronyms, the greater this density in specialised texts). The study also concludes that the concepts of abbreviation and acronym are more clearly defined in Spanish than in German, in which there is no unanimous consensus on the classification and designation of abbreviated words. Lastly, possible translation strategies are addressed and corpus examples semantically classified.