Interlingual transfer of social media terminologyA case study based on a corpus of English, Spanish and Brazilian newspaper articles

  1. María Teresa Ortego Antón 1
  2. Janine Pimentel 2
  1. 1 Universidad de Valladolid
    info

    Universidad de Valladolid

    Valladolid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/01fvbaw18

  2. 2 Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
    info

    Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

    Río de Janeiro, Brasil

    ROR https://ror.org/03490as77

Journal:
Babel: Revue Internationale de la Traduction = International Journal of Translation

ISSN: 0521-9744

Year of publication: 2019

Volume: 65

Issue: 1

Pages: 114-130

Type: Article

DOI: 10.1075/BABEL.00077.ORT DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

More publications in: Babel: Revue Internationale de la Traduction = International Journal of Translation

Sustainable development goals

Abstract

This article addresses the terminology used in the field of social media, a new field introduced by recent technological advances. As social media was first created in an English-speaking context, speakers of other languages have had to develop ways to express the concepts of this field in their own languages. It is thus relevant for translators and journalists to understand the linguistic means by which the transfer of such concepts occurs. In order to achieve this, a comparable corpus of newspaper articles on social media (Facebook and WhatsApp) written in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese was compiled and the procedures used by Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish journalists to convey frequently-used English terms were examined. The main translation procedures observed in the study are equivalence, calque, loan and paraphrase. Although most procedures occur in the texts written in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, their frequency of use indicates linguistic preferences in the languages.