A corpus-driven study of non-equivalence in financial English: credit or debit?

Although “computer tools don’t do the thinking” (Scott 2005), they can be an invaluable resource, not only because time-saving and cost-effective, but also because they can help translators and language students alike find the translations that would best fit, avoiding others that might sound unnatural and awkward. The present article investigates the lemmas credit and debit in the language of finance, with a particular emphasis on credit card and debit card as conceived in Italian and in English. The study has adopted both a corpus-based and a corpus-driven approach (Tognini Bonelli 2001), taking into account a bilingual comparable corpus, EIFECO, an ad-hoc corpus whose texts, drawn solely from The Economist and IlSole24Ore, have been selected according to explicit linguistics criteria. The lemmas credit and debit have been analyzed in their formal realizations and are compared to the Italian equivalents. The differences between English and Italian have proved to be also cultural. The purpose of this paper is to disambiguate the long-standing and twofold confusion between credit card and debit card on the one hand, and debit and debito on the other. This study is descriptive with pedagogic implications