Maria Teresa Musacchio Universit di Padova Gruppo MLT The global economic and financial crisis in English and

d Italian lexicography and terminography. A comparison.

In her contribution Maria Teresa Musacchio has analyzed a case study, discussing the global economic and financial crisis with reference to its terminology and the differences between specific terms and expressions in English and Italian, especially focusing on metaphorical terms that cannot be directly understood in another language. The starting point of the case-study was Galbraiths essay on the business cycle, which gives the idea of the ups and downs of the economy and the subsequent succession of terms which indicate the transition between good and bad times. For example, a word such as depression used to give the idea that there were problems, but they were not extremely serious. Then, it was replaced by crisis, and, afterwards, crashing fall made its appearance and indicated a much more serious problem than depression. Examples such as this show how metaphorical terms often acquire after some time such a negative connotation that they need to be replaced. At the beginning of the crisis in 2007/2008 there were various articles in the English press that offered the reader a sort of glossary listing all the terms related to the crisis that were needed to know in order to be able to understand what was going on. The same happened, a few years later, in some Italian newspapers as well, such as La Repubblica and Il Sole 24 Ore. These newspapers offered a list of terms with their equivalent in Italian and a short definition, but sometimes there were differences which showed that there was not a definite equivalent for every term taken into consideration. Furthermore, the case study focused on various terms and the differences that could be found in their Italian equivalents in different dictionaries (both monolingual and bilingual) and term banks. For example, terms and expressions such as credit crunch, dead cat bouncing, black swan and short selling (together with all of their possible English variants) were analyzed. In the end, it emerged that there was a great ambiguity as far as equivalents and definitions are concerned. It is difficult to choose whether to use a translation, a brief definition or even the original English expression and it is important to take into account a number of factors such as the opacity of the original terms to Italian readers, and how easily

they can understand the concept lying behind them. It is also fundamental to consider the terms in their original contexts, to understand how they evolve and how they are actually used. An interesting aspect of the case study was to compare trends and see when and where terms or expression were most employed: for example according to Google Trends, credit crunch was mostly used between 2007-2009, from 2009 onwards the prevailing term was credit crisis with the occasional use of credit squeeze. This trend was confirmed also by the Corpus of Contemporary American English. As far as credit crunch is concerned, there is a great difference with Italian. In fact, according to the CORIS/CODIS corpora the expression credit crunch became part of Italian only in the last few years, as a consequence it is currently much more used in Italian now that it is apparently going out of use in English. And this is just one example of how the use of terms is delayed and has a different frequency in different countries. As a consequence, whenever we deal with terminology, and especially with context terms of a metaphorical origin we need to underline cognitive and pragmatical needs. We need a dynamic view of terminology as well as a diachronic and synchronic approach to see how terms evolve over time and how they are reflected in different languages. In addition to that, it is important to trust the texts as far as use is concerned, with the support of term banks with hypertext links, corpora and statistical information.