When Italians Talk Business they Mean it

In business Italian the use of Anglicisms is charaterised by two main features. One is the growing proportion of non-adapted versus adapted loan words, the other is the significant role played by the media in introducing Anglicisms in the Italian vocabulary. Translator trainees are often faced with the problem of identifying the correct contexts in which an English lexical item can be translated with an Anglicism in Italian. This is particularly the case with polysemic words, whose respective range of meanings in the source and the receptor language tends to differ, as revealed by the definitions contained in monolingual dictionaries (Laviosa 2003). An additional difficulty is that the context provided in the receptor language is either very limited or non existent (see for example Grande Dizionario Italiano, De Mauro, 2000; or Vocabolario della Lingua Italiana, Zingarelli, 2003 respectively). The present study adopts a corpus-driven and a corpus-based approach to investigate the use of the lemma 'business' in an Italian-English comparable corpus of business language (COMIC-SALCA). This is the first step towards a fuller analysis of this term as a functionally-complete unit of meaning (Tognini-Bonelli 1996a,b; 2000; 2001). The aim is descriptive and pedagogic