Landmarks of Economic Terminology: The First Portuguese Translation of Elémens du commerce

The history of languages is closely related to the history of other human activities. Ideally, hypotheses that are designed for linguistic questions on independent grounds should help to consolidate theories in other knowledge fields, such as the history of ideas. This paper deals with the first Portuguese translation of Forbonnais’s Elémens du commerce, considering it as a lexical corpus. The linguistic analysis aims to contribute to the general knowledge about this text and its translations. Furthermore, a lexical analysis of Portuguese data can also be understood in the broader context of Romance languages. To this end, we analysed three linguistic expressions, perceived to be representative casestudies: identifying circulação as a terminological loan, the terminological use of a common word (i.e. género vs denrées) and the contrast between terms from different languages (e.g. matéria prima vs matière première). Translations are obvious tools for communicating new ideas. Carrying out linguistic analyses of translations can help to document how ideas take shape. Furthermore, translation studies provide linguistic evidence that is essential for the study of terminology from a diachronic and interlinguistic standpoint. Data provided by translated texts helps to clarify the date when neologisms were first introduced in a given language. It also helps to identify possible sources of words and to decode the meaning behind lexical innovation. This paper is an example of the output of a contrastive lexicographic approach to Forbonnais’s text.