Neonyms for a crisis: Cognitive, terminological and socio-pragmatic aspects in the translation of new financial terms into Spanish

Abstract

The current economic and financial crisis apart from impoverishing many countries has paradoxically enriched language by coining a multitude of new terms to explain and define the new situation. However, due to different cognitive, terminological and socio-pragmatic constraints, many of these financial neonyms, originally created in English, have been poorly transferred into Spanish or left untranslated thus losing most of their original distinctive and explanatory purpose. Many Spanish financial experts tend to use the English forms or render literal and often meaningless translations. This paper explores the structure of financial crisis neonyms in the light of their terminological composition and professional and social practice and focusses on the problems created by their translation into Spanish mainly as a result of cognitive-inferential, semantic-terminological and pragmatic-communicative mismatches.