## Esther Fraile Vicente*

## The lexicographical treatment of idioms in business dictionaries from the point of view of the translator as user

## Abstract

Economic language presents a hybrid nature. Unlike other LSPs, this discourse shows a high degree of emotive meaning, abstract processes like metaphor, which bring about the great number of idioms used in business English, and the complexity involved in their translation into Spanish. The analysis of the lexicographical treatment of fi  ve business idioms in nineteen dictionaries of economics (monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual) reveals  that  specialized  lexicographical  resources  should  improve  their  treatment  of idioms and other phraseological units if they are to respond to the needs of users like translators.  It  is  suggested  that  specialized  works  should  include  idioms  as  lemmas, offer more types of syntactic-semantic information and structure it more systematically, for example, by basing their entries on the conceptual structure of economy.

Key words: specialized lexicography, economics, phraseology, idioms, translation.

## 1. Introduction

This article is part of a broader study (Fraile Vicente 2005) where I explored the treatment of business idioms 1 in general and specialized lexicographical resources and systems of terminology management (dictionaries, glossaries, terminological databases). On that occasion, I considered both general and specialized resources because the economic discourse analyzed shows a hybrid nature that mixes peculiarities of general language and specialized languages, as it comprises general,

1 I also refer to idioms as idiomatic, fi  gurative or metaphorical expressions or constructions.

* Esther Fraile Vicente Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación Campus de los pajaritos E-42004  Soria frailes@lia.uva.es

133

technical and semi technical 2  vocabulary: lexical units from everyday language or fi  elds related to economics, which derive metaphorically to a new specifi  c sense that is understood in context (Henderson, 2000: 172),  thus  familiarizing  the  non-expert  with  the  specialized  notions (Tercedor Sánchez, 1999: §5.6).

My present aim is to emphasize the importance of including idioms as lemmas and of describing their linguistic peculiarities in depth and their relationship with other types of related phraseological units (PUs) in general and specialized dictionaries. Certainly, though these constructions are not very frequent in the natural language, they are cognitively salient, as they constitute the intermediate level where terms associate to form word combinations that bring about the conceptual structure of a specialized domain. Besides, speakers may have trouble identifying their canonical form and translating them, as they may be quite different from one language to another.

The analysis I carry out of idioms in business dictionaries is also based on the fact that the number of LSP dictionaries far exceeds that of other types of lexicographical resources; the tendency of contemporary lexicography is specialized (Montero Martínez, 2002: 205), which means that it is essential to improve the content and accessibility of these works so that they answer the needs of their possible users.

## 2. Criteria applied to analysis

To value the quality and utility of a dictionary, it must be taken into account whether the treatment of information responds to the purpose of the  book and the target user type (Bajo Pérez, 2000: 16). Therefore, the  making of a dictionary has to follow three principles that assure the quality of the lexicographical product from the point of view of the user, and determine the layout of its macrostructure and microstructure, accessibility , actuality and reliability :

2 Herbert  (1965),  Trimble  &  Trimble  (1978),  Godman  &  Payne  (1981),  Hoffman (1985), Yang (1986), Cabré Castellví (1993 & 1994) & Alcaraz Varó (2000b) have proposed this intermediate category that explains the continuous exchange of lexical units between the general language and the specialized languages, as well as among these. The semitechnical or subtechnical terms are used in more than one fi  eld as a kind of terminological fund common to several sciences.

- The user should be able to fi  nd quickly the terminology adapted to his needs and to the communicative situation ( accessibility ).
- He should count on an updated terminology on the specialized domain implied ( actuality ).
- The terminology should be correct, precise and adequate and should have been normalized in the specifi  c fi  eld in such a way that it enables effi  cient communication in both directions: from the source to the target language and vice versa ( reliability ) (Gómez González-Jover &Vargas Sierra 2004: §3).

In this study, I recognize that the way a translator acquires expert knowledge and the celerity his work implies make this professional one of the main users of lexicographical applications. In fact, as the translator works with specialized languages, he has to assume compe  tences similar to those of the expert and combine quite different skills: the technical  knowledge  of  a  particular  fi  eld  ( cognitive  competence );  a  deep linguistic  profi  ciency  in  both  the  source  and  target  languages,  which includes  lexical,  phraseological,  and  terminological  units  ( linguistic competence );  and  a documentary competence in  information  retrieval and the available computerised tools (Cabré Castellví et al., 2000: 169). Nevertheless, the specialized resources conceived for the translator should contain different information from that required by those directed to an expert:

Mientras un especialista acude al diccionario terminológico porque necesita comunicarse con otros colegas en una lengua distinta de la suya, con el objeto de encontrar el equivalente de traducción de un término, el traductor necesita que el diccionario no sólo le ofrezca equivalentes, sino que le proporcione otra información que le facilite la comprensión y la producción de textos (Gómez González-Jover & Vargas Sierra 2004: §3) 3 .

Certainly, to be a useful resource for the translator of business idioms, the specialized dictionary should meet two complementary needs, text comprehension and production, as the translator must be able to understand the source text and to codify it in the target language in such a way that it looks natural to the target language reader (Fraile Vicente, In press a). This implies that the LSP dictionary should include both encyclopaedic and linguistic knowledge; it should offer more syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information concerning idioms, and this should be structured more systematically:

3 While an expert uses the terminological dictionary because he needs to communicate with other colleagues in a language different from his own, to fi  nd the translation equivalent of a term, the translator needs that the dictionary not only offers equivalents, but also provides other information to ease text comprehension and production.

- A defi  nition which provides the conceptual knowledge and the fi  eld specifi  c notions.
- A lexicon which comprises three levels of specialization (technical, semi technical,  and  general  vocabulary);  as  well  as  the  phraseological  units (such as the idioms studied); contexts, examples, usage notes, and other linguistic indications: grammatical category, subject-fi  eld label, synonyms, antonyms, cross-references, variants that are a help in the decisionmaking process that translation implies (Gómez González-Jover & Vargas Sierra, 2004: §3).

To assess whether the specialized dictionaries analyzed respond to the needs of the translator-user, I studied the treatment in these works of fi  ve business idioms selected from among those included in English Idioms (Seidl 1990). I specifi  cally chose expressions that exemplify the most frequent types of conceptual metaphors in English and Spanish: both languages use animate metaphors to describe economy ( growth, depression ) and economic organisations ( parent/ sister company ) as under the control of experts, whereas inanimate metaphors are used to describe market movements ( rebounds, slides ) as beyond human control (Charteris-Black, 2000: 149 & 163). In that way, I analyzed two expressions with organic images: an animal ( bear market ) and a person ( sleeping  partner ),  that  I  completed  with  three  metaphorical  constructions that show inorganic images ( blue chip, gilt-edged stocks/ securities and talk shop ). Nevertheless, due to the limits of length of a research article, I only present the entries of the two idioms most frequent in dictionaries ( bear market and blue chip ).

I investigated the treatment of these idioms in some of the main business dictionaries in English and Spanish following the criteria of formal evaluation (qualitative and quantitative) established by Haensch (1997: 239-243) for these kinds of works with regard to the guidelines for idiom selection and inclusion, the place of the dictionary where these constructions should appear, the way they should be lemmatized, and the classes of lexical information that should be offered with them:

- As regards the dictionary macrostructure (the external organization of the lexicographical articles in their mutual relationship), I considered whether the instructions given in the introduction about the treatment of idioms are clear and suffi  cient for the user; whether the symbols and abbreviations used are adequate, complete and are applied systematically; if typography is useful to clearly differentiate the lemma, the phonetic, orthographic and grammatical labels, the defi  nition and the translation equivalents.
- In the analysis of the microstructure (the internal organization of articles), I checked if the different types of phraseological units are identifi  ed with the corresponding syntagmatic label; the lemmatization criteria used with idioms (whether these units appear as an independent entry or as run-ons inside the article of one of its lexical components); if the idiom is offered with  orthographic  variants,  grammatical  indications,  examples  of  use, pragmatic  information  (synonyms,  antonyms,  cross-references  and  other semantically-related terms); if the translation equivalents proposed are correct (whether it is indicated, for example, that a fi  gurative expression has a near-equivalent in the target language or it can only be transferred with a paraphrase).

First of all, I offer some general traits on the character of each dictionary based on the peculiarities set forth in their introductions and backcovers in order to verify to what extent the reality of the book responds to the qualities announced.

## 3. Results and Discussion

## 3.1.  Monolingual Business Dictionaries

First,  I  analyzed  the  dictionaries  in  the  English  language  and  then those in Spanish, both pedagogical and more technical works, with the purpose of examining the different treatment they give to idioms. In general, these books are aimed at a wide variety of users that range from university students, to translators and business professionals, and pretend to cover the essential notions of the main branches of economics. 4  They show  a  very  similar  organization  and  content  of  entries:  the  lemma may appear in a simple or complex form; the defi  nition may include cross-references to other entries; they consider polysemy, so that they highlight  the  different  meanings  a  lemma  may  display  in  each  fi  eld. The function  of  business  dictionaries  is  to  clarify  meaning,  not  use;

4 Business,  banking,  commerce,  accounting,  public  fi  nance,  law,  commodity  exchanges, computers, insurance, management, quality control, stock market, taxation…

LONGMAN

PALGRAVE

THE MER

ECONOMICS

BUSINESS

ENGLISH

THE LAW

DICTIONARY

Over 20,000 vonds anu plurams

NEW

that is why their main difference with respect to general dictionaries is  that  they  do  not  usually  contain  phonetic,  pragmatic,  grammatical labelling or contextual examples. They do not include phraseological information either; in other words, users are not advised of the possible collocational restrictions of terms (Montero Martínez, 2002: 205-206):

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1. The new Palgrave. A Dictionary of Economics (NPDE) (1991) is the typical classical dictionary that is updated regularly. 5 It is the successor of the Dictionary of Political Economy written by Palgrave in 1894. It appears to incorporate many topics that were emerging when the fi  rst work was published and that have later assumed an important dimension in the fi  eld of economics. It constitutes an encyclopaedic dictionary, compiled by

100 important economists who have overseen many of the 2,000 entries in its four volumes. The articles are followed by bibliographical references that allow the user to expand the notions consulted. At the beginning of each volume, there is a list of the entries and cross-references, and the fi  nal analytic index includes the total number of articles and information on essential economic concepts that are not contemplated in the dictionary (authors, history, pages with related notions).This classical work neglects phraseological information as, in fact, it does not include any of the idioms studied: bear market, blue chip, gilt-edged value, talk shop and sleeping partner .

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2. The Longman  Dictionary  of  Business  English (LDBE) (1989) aims to be completely updated and to cover the language of business and commerce; it is intended  for  teachers  and  students  who  have  English as a fi  rst or second language. The book provides about 13,000 entries, clear comprehensive defi  nitions and  examples,  written  with  an  essential  vocabulary of 2,000 words based on the General Service List of English  Words by  Michael  West.  It  offers  additional data on weights and measures, conversion factors,

world currencies and a complete system of cross-references (introduced by the labels see under, see, cf., see also ). In general, the work includes a high degree of syntactic-semantic information: numbered entries to distinguish the different meanings of polysemous words; grammatical category; subject-fi  eld labels in small capitals (ACCTS. - accounts, BKG.banking,  COM.  -  commerce...);  examples  in  a  context  where  the  variants  of  the  expressions  are  indicated  with  slashes  (this  function  can also be pointed out with or, also ); related words ( Also ); synonyms and antonyms ( Syn./Opp. ); abbreviations or short forms of the expressions ( Abbr. ); register label ( coll. ). The authors recommend looking up a construction under one of its lexical words, not necessarily the fi  rst one, which is not user-friendly enough: in account with is described in the verb account , whereas payable in arrear is not explained in the entry of the verb but in that of the noun arrear . The phraseological units can appear independently or as subentries. The main entries are organized in alphabetical order and the subentries are also treated as main entries and include a reference to the lemma under which they are defi  ned. Occasionally, what can be considered almost a phraseological label is displayed, the general indication fi g. (fi gurative ), although I did not discover it in any of the expressions studied. It is one of the few dictionaries that contain all the idioms investigated (including talk shop ). That is why, except for the lack of phraseological labels to delimit the classes of PUs, it shows one of the best lexicographical treatments of the constructions analyzed:

5 Like those by Lozano or Tamames in Spanish.

```
bear v. (1)(5) 6 bear campaign bear market see under market bear position, bear raid, bear run, bear squeeze, bear tack, bear transaction market (1)(5) active market bear market STK. EXCH. A market in which prices are tending to fall. One in which there are many bears . Syn. A down market. Cf. bull market.
```

6 I  have  kept  the  original  typography.  In  those  entries  that  are  longer,  I  have  just picked up the defi  nition of the concrete idioms studied, followed by a list of the constructions related to them.

## blue v. ( colloq. )

## blue book

blue chip STK. EXCH. a commercial or industrial share of the highest class among investments. A blue chip company must be well-known., have a large paid-up capital, a good record in paying a high rate of dividend in good times and bad, a highly-skilled and progressive management, and must provide a safe investment. Cf. gilt-edged securities. Syn. alpha stocks.

blue-collar workers, blueprint, blue-sky laws

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3. The Oxford  Dictionary  of  Business  English (ODBE) (1994) has the profi  le of a didactic work that promises essential vocabulary, clear but detailed definitions, and over 5,000 examples based on the Oxford Corpus (collection of texts in written and spoken  English  extracted  from  diverse  sources).  Contents  are  displayed  in  two  columns,  the  right  one comprises lemmas, defi  nition and examples; the left one the lexical-grammatical labelling: abbreviations (geographical indications, subject-fi  eld and register

labels), pronunciation, collocations, grammatical notes and a complex system of cross-references to related words, synonyms and antonyms. This lay out responds effectively to the needs of two user types: those worried about decodifi  cation  will  be  interested  in  the  defi  nition,  and those with a codifying purpose will focus on the lexical-grammatical information on the right part. It contains only the entries for bear market, gilts and sleeping partner :

bear market noun (stock exchange) (slang) a  situation  in  a  stock  market  or  currency market where prices are falling because lots  of  shareholders are selling: Sterling has now moved into a major bear market.

/´be ∂ ,m α :kIt/ note usually singular

- ►◄ bear market dealing, prices
- bull market, market

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4. The Collins Dictionary of Business (CDB) (1995) is also directed at a mixed audience and boasts of refl  ecting  'the nuts & bolts of  business  practice,'  the concepts, methods, and techniques used in business, marketing, and fi  nance. Compared with the previous books, this one is more elemental because it favours an  encyclopaedic  character  to  the  detriment  of  the linguistic information. The work does not pretend to be comprehensive and refers to other dictionaries by

Collins for the more elusive expressions. 7 It is based on austere defi  nitions that lead to related terms in small capitals, cross-references introduced by See and antonymous words marked by Compare . Nevertheless, the reference system is not perfect (in speculation, bear market is not mentioned; joint-stock company does not refer to blue-chip company either) and, once more, there is no proper treatment of the phraseological units:

## bear

bear  market a  situation  in  which  the  prices  of  FIANCIAL  SECURITIES (stocks, shares) or COMMODITIES (tin, wheat) tend to fall as a result of persistent selling and only limited buying. See SPECULATION. Compare BULL MARKET.

'blue-chip' company a large well-established JOINT-STOCK COMPANY, with considerable assets whose SHARES investors regard as low-risk investment.

blue-collar worker

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5. The Diccionario  de  Teoría  Económica  (DTE) (1985), by Ahijado and Agier with 2,500 articles, is a dictionary in Spanish that is aimed at the students of economics and deals with the whole fi  eld and its new branches. Even so, it falls short of the writers' expectations: it includes mainly defi  nitions with references to related words, but terms in English are explained only occasionally and translation equivalents

are rarely offered. The book does not show other semantic or syntactic information useful to the user. In my search of idioms, I just found the adjective applied to the fi  rst expression:

7 Collins Dictionary of Economics and Collins Dictionary of Computing.

Bajista. En la Bolsa de Valores y mercado de divisas, especulador que vende acciones y/o títulos y/o divisas que posee o no, esperando una caída de los precios y, con ello, que los podrá recomprar con benefi  cio. Es la antítesis del alcista ( → ). El que vende las que no tiene, se dice que ha 'vendido corto'; si vende las que posee, que 'se ha cubierto'.

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6. Diccionario Akal de Economía Moderna (DAEM) (1999) is an authorized updated dictionary that has been compiled under the direction of D. W. Pearce and the collaboration of numerous specialists of international  renown.  It  constitutes  an  encyclopaedic work of almost 2,800 entries. It encompasses the fundamental notions of economic theory, the biography and works of great economists, including the winners

of the Nobel Prize, comparative statistics about the most important economic variables in the countries selected, and the most frequent acronyms used in business. An English equivalent is added next to each lemma but, apart from this detail, the book is not very interesting for the study of phraseology. In fact, I only found the Spanish equivalent of the fi  rst idiom I am studying, as if it formed part of a list, without a defi  nition, examples or other indications:

BAJISTAS (bears)

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7. The Diccionario  Terminológico  de  Economía, Administración y Finanzas (DTEAF) (2000), by Suárez Suárez, is an encyclopaedic work that pretends to defi  ne the fundamental terms of economics for the general  reader.  Its  objectives  are  clarity,  precision,  and conciseness. Although  the  main  body  is  in  Spanish, the  book  includes  a  fi  nal  list  of  English  equivalents where I looked up my idioms. It only provides defi  ni-

tions and, in spite of the varied lists that are included (one at the beginning with all the lemmas considered, and a fi  nal one with their English equivalents), it is not a great help to the user and shows lack of coordination between the two linguistic sections, as can be observed with the idioms investigated:

- Regarding the fi  rst one, I think I found an error as it reads as bearer market when I did not fi  nd this version in any of the other reference works.

In addition, the Spanish section does not include mercado bajista, bajista or a la baja.

- As for blue chip ,  it  does not appear in the fi  nal index, and its translation equivalents acciones or valores de primera, valores seguros, valores punteros cannot be found inside the dictionary. I discovered the English idiom mentioned by chance in the defi  nition of valores estrella.
- I  did  not  obtain the equivalents of the other metaphorical expressions ( gilt-edged securities, sleeping partner o talk shop ):

Bearer market mercado en el que los precios están bajando o se espera que bajen.

Valores estrella Valores, generalmente acciones, emitidos por compañías importantes, de elevado volumen de contratación en general y, por tanto, muy líquidos, que son los primeros en reaccionar, tanto al alza como a la baja, y que arrastran con ellos a todo el mercado. Son los denominados blue chip en inglés.

## 3.2.  Bilingual Business Dictionaries

The lemmas in the bilingual specialized dictionaries are usually simple, but they turn out to be more interesting for the analysis of phraseology because, unlike the monolingual dictionaries, they include a greater number of the most frequent collocates and of polylexematic constructions. Each lemma is followed by its translation equivalent or equivalents, among which the user has to choose on the basis of his previous experience, as these works do not present a defi  nition. Like the bilingual general dictionaries, the specialized ones do not generally comprise phonetic or grammatical labelling or examples of use. However, the bilingual specialized dictionaries elaborated by Alcaraz Varó and his team include information of several classes: orthographic, morphologic, functional, pragmatic, relational and explicative on collocations and compound expressions (Alcaraz Varó & Huges 1998, 2002; Alcaraz Varó et al. 1999 y 2000). Again, I present fi  rst the books edited in the Anglo-Saxon countries and then those published in Spain, both ordered chronologically:

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1. The Business Spanish Dictionary (BSD) (1998) offers the essential economic commercial vocabulary to a wide range of users (translators, businessmen,  secretaries,  students).  Unlike  the  previous dictionaries, it constitutes the typical bilingual work that  does  not  include  defi  nitions  but  only  translation equivalents. This fact, from my point of view, represents one of its main drawbacks. In contrast, it presents  numerous  examples  with  their  correct translation in a defi  nite context. It sometimes offers short quotations from actual newspapers and maga-

zines in English and Spanish that illustrate the use of the construction in both languages (see the entry for blue chip ).  This  book  includes  the phonetics of English terms; it clearly distinguishes the uses of a term when it can be both a verb and a noun; it contains grammatical indications (category, gender, number); subject-fi  eld labels and references to semantically-related  constructions.  However,  the  work  does  not  employ labels to differentiate some phraseological units from others. In relation to the use of abbreviations, I do not think it is adequate to separate the components of PUs inserting grammatical indications of gender and number, or the words o/or (as in the entry for gilts : 'títulos mpl del Estado or de la deuda pública or bonos mpl del Tesoro'). Besides, I did not observe a high level of coordination between the two linguistic sections: in the Spanish part, mercado a la baja is not translated as 'bear market' 8 and  I  found  far  less  collocations  with bear ;  as  regards  the translation of blue-chips , I did not see 'inversiones de toda confi  anza' or ' acciones de toda confi  anza', but a similar construction 'inversiones en valores de la máxima confi  anza'. In any case, the dictionary does contain more idioms than other works studied ( bear market, blue chip and  else gilt-edged  value and sleeping  partner ),  which  constitutes  a step forward compared to them:

=

bear [be ∂ ] 1 noun (a) (b) (Stock Exchange) bajista mf; bear market mercado bajista; bear sale = venta a la baja; see BULL. 2 verb.

mercado nm (a) (lonja)

market,

(b) (comercio) market , mercado cautivo, mercado cerrado o controlado, mercado deprimido o a la baja = depressed market.

8 Note: I use inverted commas to differentiate translations from lemmas.

blue [blu:] adjective blue chip-investments or blue-chip shares or blue chips = inversiones or acciones or títulos de toda confi  anza. QUOTE  soaring  blue  chips  and  off-shore  buying  helped  Australian shares to a new high yesterday. The market opened higher and hopes of an interest rate cut buoyed sentiment. West Australian

inversion nf (a) (capital  invertido) inversión  inmobiliaria,  inversiones a interés fi  jo, inversión a largo plazo or a corto plazo, inversión segura, inversiones en valores de la máxima confi  anza = bluechip investments.

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2. The Spanish  Dictionary  of  Business,  Commerce  &  Finance  (SDBCF) (1998)  has  been  compiled by Muñiz Castro, interpreter, translator, and terminologist.  From  a  lexicographical  point  of view, it seems more solid than other similar dictionaries,  such  as  those  by  Ahijado  or  Mochón, whose authors are economists. The back cover offers answers to the users´ needs in the main commercial,  economic,  fi  nancial,  industrial  and  legal domains. The book comprises the fundamental vo-

cabulary of each fi  eld, more than 100,000 terms and references. It represents an essential tool for translators, created by more than 40 specialists,  revised  by  translators,  expert  businessmen, academics, and lexicographers. This work collects supplementary encyclopaedic material (business correspondence, market shares, fi  nancial indexes…). In spite of the fact that it does not include defi  nitions, it does provide subjectfi  eld  labels,  contexts,  geographical  codes,  explanations,  or  cultural equivalences of terms that guarantee a correct translation equivalent. The introduction states that the dictionary is based on a sophisticated data  base  with  a  relational  structure,  which  stores  the  vocabulary  of each language and the relationship among terms in different fi  les so that they  may function as translations. An abbreviation placed after each term indicates its grammatical category; those expressions where the initial word is identical but belong to different grammatical categories are distinguished with a supra-index placed after each of its meanings; explanations are introduced by a diamond but, in practice, the use of this symbol is confusing as it is not clear whether it is used to introduce examples (it is scarce with this function) or to separate the part of the entry devoted to the phraseological units. Most PUs (idioms included)

are shown after the lemma which is substituted by the symbol ∼ ; they are displayed in alphabetical order according to the fi  rst word. A phraseological label is not included to identify and distinguish the phraseological  units.  Nevertheless,  collocational  information  is  frequently  offered in italics to facilitate the usage of a term (the subject or object or a verb, the nouns that are frequently used with an adjective, the adjectives that usually accompany a noun). When a term allows several translations in different fi  elds, the suitable version is shown after the subjectfi  eld label; if there is no direct equivalence, a defi  nition or paraphrase is indicated with different typography; in those cases in which a word has several  possible  translations,  the  one  the  experts  consulted  consider more plausible is offered. It is one of the works that includes more idioms ( bear market, blue chip, gilt-edged value, talk shop, sleeping partner ) and the one that shows more appearances of most of them (though I did not fi  nd mercado a la baja in the Spanish part):

```
bear 1 n ACC, BANK, STOCK bajista m; ~ account; ~ call spread; ~ campaign; ~ closing; ~ covering; ~ hug; ~ market STOCK mercado bajista m , mercado a la baja m; ~ operation; ~ position; ~ put spread; ~ raid; ~ raiding; ~ sale; ~ speculation; ~ spread; ~ squeeze; ~ strike price; ~ transaction. bearish 2  ~ market n STOCK Mercado a la baja m; ~ movement; ~ signal information; ~ spread; ~tone. mercado 1 m COM GEN market, marketplace ~ bajista BOLSA bear market, declining market.
```

- blue: ~ book; ~ button; ~ chip n FIN STOCK valor de primera clase m ; ~ chip company n STOCK compañía de acciones de primera clase f ; ~ chip customer n GE COMM cliente de primer orden mf ; ~ chip industrials n pl STOCK valores industriales de primera clase m pl ; ~ chip securities n pl STOCK valores de primera clase m pl ; ~ chip stock n STOCK acciones de primer orden f pl ; ~ chips n pl FIN acciones selectas f pl ; STOCK valores seguros; ~ -collar worker; ~ economy; ~ laws; ~ sky; ~ sky bargaining; ~ sky law; ~sky research. acciones f pl COM GEN títulos, valores, capital stocks ( stcks, stks ), zares ( shs ) ~ de primer orden BOLSA blue-chip stock.

valores m pl BANCA zares ( shs ), BOLSA equities, COM GEN securites, valuables, CONT zares ( shs ), FIN shares ( shs ), paper ( infrml )

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3. The Diccionario Espasa Economía y Negocios (DEEN) (1997) presents more than 5,000 articles backed up by the prestige and experience of Arthur Andersen, together with precise updated defi  nitions in a clear style (due to its nature as a monolingual work with bilingual orientation). It offers the user all the branches of the knowledge of economics in a single work. It includes

abbreviations that specify the fi  eld the idiom is used in ( Bn. Banca, Fin. Financiero, Sds. Sociedades).  Each  lemma  is  translated  into  English and a fi  nal English-Spanish inverse vocabulary is included to improve the chances of fi  nding any expression. Nevertheless, if you start from the English construction, you will need two searches (fi  rst that of the English expression in the fi  nal index, then that of its Spanish equivalent that is defi  ned in the main body of the book). The dictionary does not include phraseological labels or other syntactic-semantic information. Although it contains the two idioms I considered in the study, it does not show the rest of the fi  gurative expressions I investigated ( gilt-edged securities, talk shop ):

## bear hug

bear market a la baja, mercado bajista

bear operator, bear position bearish

a la baja ( bear market, bearish downward )

Bn,  Fin. Expresión  aplicada  a  algunos  documentos  que  indica  que pueden ser transmitidos simplemente por endoso.

mercado bajista ( bear market )

Fin . Mercado en el que los precios se encuentran en descenso y en el que se realizan numerosas operaciones de venta.

blue chip blue chip, valor seguro

'Blue Chip' ( Blue Chip )

Fin. Titulo-valor puntero. Término inglés que se refi  ere a valores que aseguran buenas posiciones en Bolsa debido a su gran calidad, a que tienden a aumentar su cotización y a que su volumen de contratación es alto. En el negocio bursátil. 'Blue Chip' se refi  ere a las acciones de las compañías con más prestigio que suelen alcanzar precios altos y ofrecer rendimientos relativamente bajos.

## valor seguro ( blue chip ) Fin. Véase blue chip

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4. The Diccionario de Términos Financieros y de Inver  sión (DTFI) (1998), by Mochón Morcillo and Isidro Aparicio, has approximately 2,500 terms with their English  equivalents.  Defi  nitions  of  the  essential  economic  notions  are  explained  in  depth  and  are  cross-referenced. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order. It  employs  the  sign  //  to  separate  the  different  meanings of polysemous terms. Like the previous dictionary,

this one contains a separate list of English-Spanish terms that makes it easier to look for concepts when you only know the English version of a construction, but again you will need two searches. It also includes a list of English-Spanish abbreviations and acronyms. Once more, the dictionary  has  no  phraseological  value. Although  it  shows  one  more construction related to bear market, the expressions are not identifi  ed as idiomatic and you do not fi  nd similar metaphorical expressions such as sleeping partner or talk shop . On the other hand, it is surprising not to fi  nd the defi  nition of bear. The merit of this work consists in presenting clear defi  nitions, in some cases related to the institution that uses the construction or to its motivation, but it includes scarce lexical content with the PUs:

Bear bond, Bear hug Bear market Mercado bajista Bear raid, Bear spread Bearish

Mercado bajista ( Bear Market ) Situación de un mercado que se caracteriza  por  una  tendencia  de  caída  de  precios  y  volúmenes  de  contratación.

Bajista ( Bearish ) Referido a un mercado, indica que se espera una caída en los precios o cotizaciones y, en consecuencia, una subida en los tipos de interés. Las expectativas de caída de los precios presionan a la venta, lo que a su vez refuerza dichas expectativas.

Blue-chips Blue-chips

Blue-chips ( Blue-chips ) Con este nombre se designa en Wall Street , Bolsa de Nueva York, a los títulos de las empresas de primera fi  la, de cotización estable y buenos rendimientos, que ofrecen mayor seguridad al inversor.

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5. The Diccionario de Términos Económicos, Financieros y Comerciales (DTEFC) (2002), compiled by Alcaraz  Varó  and  Hughes,  continues  and  complements the Diccionario  de  términos  jurídicos (Ariel Derecho 1993) and is aimed mainly at translators, students, and professionals of the different branches of economic sciences. The didactic criterion used constitutes one of its best advantages. Unlike the previ-

ous books, this one does include defi  nitions, clear examples, and explanations, including the treatment of idioms that help limit and clarify the meaning of many new phraseological units not included in other dictionaries. In addition, the introduction is a brilliant refl  ection on the regis  ter  differences  between the three linguistic varieties of economics,  the  economic,  fi  nancial  and  commercial  languages.  The  dictionary boasts of having included a great number of the frequent colloquial expressions related to the fi  nancial world, many of which have an idiomatic character ( The pound took a beating, 'la libra quedó maltrecha o fue vapuleada,' Firms in the sector have beefed up their prices , 'han pegado una subida brutal a los precios,') 9 although idioms are not identifi  ed as such. Even so, this work shows one of the best treatments of phraseology. Each entry comprises the lemma, its translation, a short example which contextualizes the meaning conveyed and explanations for the translator, when they are required by the novelty or complexity of the term. Meaning is complemented by short descriptions and references to related words at the end of articles preceded by V. (véase) o S. ( see ) that enhance clarity. Partial synonyms go before a comma, antonyms or related words before semicolon. Polysemous terms are shown with numbers after the entry, repetition which goes against the principle of economy but in favour of clarity. The authors use the abbreviation US when the construction is only used in American English, or when the meaning indicated is different from that used in the United Kingdom. However, the frontiers between American and British English are becoming more and more blurred and terms are practically interchangeable between the two (Alcaraz Varó & Hughes 2002: 7-23). A subject-fi  eld label is added when the term has a concrete fi  eld of application. Not all the words of one part are contained in the other because what is a lexical unit in one section can be a mere paraphrase in the other. In fact, the English-Spanish part is full of explanations that have been omitted in the Spanish-English section for the sake of economy and have been substituted, on the other hand, by synonyms and related words that help the user choose the right meaning. The phraseological units are introduced by the general label fr [phr] ,  which implies that the DTEFC, in spite of including varied lexical information, fails to classify conveniently the different types of PUs it comprises or to use adequately the terms phraseological unit or/and idiom. Likewise, the book does not differentiate between the uses of the same term as a noun and as a verb, which can lead the user to an error (personally, I have marked with a star the uses of bear as a noun to differentiate them from those that function as verbs). All in all, I believe that this dictionary surpasses most of the previous works due to the number of idioms contained and the quality and exhaustiveness of its entries:

9 This tendency is due to The Economist and its marked preference for the colloquial terms of American English, a relaxed style, the witty colourful expressions that are conquering the fi  nancial world. The dictionary has been compiled with material from economic newspapers and magazines ( Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, The Economist). In Spanish, publications such as: Cinco Días, Expansión, La Gaceta de los Negocios, El País Negocios, ABC, El Mundo, Diario 16, La Actualidad Económica, Ranking have been consulted, which have provided the register and tone of many expressions ( perforar el suelo, los embates de la competencia, chiringuitos fi  nancieros, varapalo bajista ) and have also supplied the English term in italics, its meaning in Spanish and, sometimes, a clear explanation of its use.

- It  shows  all  the  expressions  investigated  ( bear  market,  blue  chip,  giltedged stock, sleeping partner ) but one ( talk shop ).
- It includes almost as many expressions related to bear market as the DBEE (the last one also contains bear operator and bear spread ):

bear 1 a/n/v : bajista; con tendencia a la baja; pesimista; inversor bursátil con expectativas bajistas; especulador que vende valores porque espera una caída en los precios y, de esta manera, comprará a un precio inferior, con la consecuente ganancia, lo que ha vendido; oso; especular a la baja; provocar bajas en el mercado; el uso de la palabra bear en el contexto de 'bajista', etc., probablemente venga del dicho inglés selling the bearskin before catching the bear -vender la piel del oso antes de cazarlo; V: bulll, bull market; averaging down; sell short; covered/ protected bear.

bear 2, bear 3

bear a loss,  *bear  account,  *bear  bond,  *bear  campaign,  *bear clique, *bear closing/covering, bear down prices, *bear hug, bear interest

bear market (BOLSA COMER Mercado bajista, a la baja o replegado a la baja; en este tipo de mercado los especuladores suelen vender valores, divisas o productos sobre los que no poseen más que acciones; V. selling short ) .

*bear note, bear on, bear out, *bear panic, *bear period, *bear position, *bear raid/raiding, bear resemblance, *bear run, *bear sale, *bear seller, *bear slide, *bear spread, *bear squeeze, bear the expenses, bear the market, bear time spread.

bearish,  *bearish  covering,  *bearish  mind,  *bearish  remark, *bearish tendency

## mercado n

mercado  a  la  baja,  deprimido  o  replegado (bear/  declining/  depressed market; S. bolsa débil ).

mercado bajista, a la baja, replegado a la baja (bear market).

blue a:

blue book

blue chip (de confi  anza, estelar, de primera fi  la. JP Morgan is a bluechip  American  Bank ), blue  chips,  blue  chip  stock (FINAN  valores punteros/  estrella,  títulos  de  primera,  acciones  triple A), blue  chip stock (BOLSA valores seguros, valores punteros en bolsa, valores sólidos o de toda confi  anza; V. leaders, gilt-edged securities, high grade bond, fallen angel ).

valor n:

valor de primera clase (S. valores estrella )

valores n:

valores de canto rodado (gilt-edged securities, blue chip securities; S. valores de primera clase )

valores de primera clase o de toda confi  anza (gilt-edged/blue chip securities; S. valores de canto rodado )

valores estrellas (blue chips, gilt-edged securities: S. valores de canto rodado )

valores punteros, estrellas o seguros (blue chip stock, leaders, alpha securities/stock/shares).

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6. The English-Spanish  Banking  Dictionary  (ESBD) (2000), elaborated by Gil Esteban, unlike the other books (it is only similar to the DTEFC in this sense), has the aim of collecting the technical terms used in  banking,  together  with  many  of  the  colloquial words and expressions that are used informally by bankers and are known as 'banking jargon.' The book shows many of these constructions with the register label (col.). It also aims to offer as many defi  nitions and/or translation equivalents  from

English to Spanish (and vice versa ) as possible. Nevertheless, the dictionary does not present defi  nitions but mainly translations; it looks like a list of lemmas with their equivalents; it fails to use abbreviations systematically as these mix different classes of indications (register, geographical, grammatical). Although it just contains three of the idioms studied ( bear market, blue chip, gilt-edged securities ), I include this work because it is the one that provides more constructions related to bluechip :  the following transmit the positive sense that 'blue' has in this idiom ( blue button, blue chips, blue-ribbon, blueprint ) and the rest suggest  more negative connotations ( blue collar worker, blue law, bluepencil ):

bear , a la baja; en baja; en descenso; decreciente (adj., masc. &fem.)

bear bond, bear covering,

bear market, mercado bajista; mercado a la baja.

bear sale, bear spread, bear trap

bearish, bearish attitude towards, bearish covering, bearish market, bearish tendency.

mercado a la baja, bearish market; active market mercado bajista, bearish market; bear market.

## blue button, blue collar worker,

blue chips (col.) acciones de primera clase, acciones de primera categoría, valores bursátiles de gran capitalización.

blue law, blue onips,

blue-chip (adj.) de primera clase, de primera categoría, de primer orden, de mínimo riesgo.

blue-chip shares acciones de primera clase, acciones de primera categoría, valores bursátiles de gran capitalización.

blue-pencil, blue-ribbon, blueprint, blue-sky law,

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7.  The Diccionario  Económico-Financiero  Inglés-Español  (DEFIE) (2000)  does  not  pretend to  be  an  exhaustive  work,  but  rather  to  offer  a use  ful, practical tool to a wide range of professional and inexperienced users. Ruiz de Canales explains the economic terminology traditionally employed in the Anglo-Saxon world, the expressions used in Wall Street and other important markets such as London, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid, or Tokyo. Unlike the other dictionaries, it contains only an English-Spanish section which includes

the translation equivalents in Spanish, in brackets, next to the English lemma. The use of the geographical abbreviations or those of refer  ences is not systematic. The layout is bare; the book does not consider the difference between the types of phraseological units, and does not include either examples or other kinds of lexical information. However, I take it into account because it contains new expressions related to those analyzed, one with bear market ( bear hug takeover ) and two with blue chips ( blue lost book y blue sky law ):

Bear, Bearish, Bear account, Bear campaign, Bear hug, Bear hug takeover

Bear market (Mercado bajista) Periodo durante el cual las acciones bajan, ya que los accionistas venden pensando que el mercado descenderá aún más.

Bear position, Bear raid, Bear spread, Bear squeeze

## Blue book

Blue chips (Acciones estrella) Valores libres de riesgo de una buena empresa y que cuenta con un buen historial de dividendos.

Blue lost book , Blue sky law

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8. The aim of the Diccionario Bilingüe de Economía  y  Empresa,  Inglés-Español,  Español-Inglés (DBEE) (2001), as Lozano Irueste explains in the introduction, is to correct the absence of a dictionary which offers Spanish translations of the words and constructions  frequent  in  the  economic  bibliography in the English language, to contribute to the development of the Spanish economic discourse. The author presumes that there is no bilingual business

dictionary in any language as comprehensive as his. Certainly, its six editions complete and update the work. The fi  rst one consists of two parts  with  around  35,000  words  in  each  language  (though  Lozano Irueste recognizes later that he miscalculated and the correct number of entries amounted to more than 40,000). The third edition computerizes the text to offer the reader a rapidly updated publication (which is especially  important  in  economics).  The  sixth  edition,  the  last  one,  adds 18,533 articles to the book that fi  nally consists of 61,808 terms and expressions in the Spanish-English section and 53,507 in the second part. The DBEE selects English words and expressions frequent in business texts that belong to all the branches of economics, to related sciences (law, statistics, computing) and to the common lexicon. It takes into account the terms habitually used in Spanish speaking countries, mainly those exclusively employed there. In spite of all this, Lozano Irueste does not pretend to have compiled an exhaustive work but rather one that explores all the search possibilities available. Thus, the dictionary focuses on translation and presents the translation equivalent preferred by businessmen, or the one included in the big glossaries of economic terms, like that of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, whose authority is unanimously recognized. If several translation possibilities are accepted, the dictionary provides all of them; when there is still no accepted translation, one is proposed and is generally successful ( crowding-out-effect 'efecto expulsion', fl ypaper effect 'efecto de adherencia'). Like the previous works, it can be objected that this dictionary does not use labels for each type of phraseological unit; these units are included arbitrarily, either after the defi  nition, or in the independent section devoted to them at the end of the entry; and the choice between one of the two possibilities is taken depending on the words that precede or follow the lemma. Furthermore, the book presents together the uses of a term as a noun and as a verb; keywords are followed by long lists of phraseological units without any indication of the type of unit, and as a result, it is diffi  cult to remember the meaning of each construction independently or to see the difference between them. The work seldom includes examples of use or information of other kinds. Both comma and brackets are used to mark synonymous expressions with apparently no signifi  cant difference between them, when I do not think two symbols are necessary to convey just one function. One of the advantages of the dictionary is the inclusion of references to synonymous or antonymous expressions, as well as the great number of polylexematic variants that are offered with each lemma, 26 idiomatic for bear (again, I have marked with a star those which are nouns), though it does not contain  some  of  the  idioms  I  analyzed  ( blue  chip,  gilt-edged,  talk shop ):

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9.  The Diccionario  de  Economía  y  Finanzas (DEF) (2002), by the well-known Spanish economist Ramón Tamames, comprises over 6,000 articles that synthesize the essence of the science of economics. Each term is followed by its English version. The book includes statistical concepts, together with the fundamental notions of the vast fi  nancial  world.  It  devotes  wide  sections  to  the schools of economic thought and the organisms of

global economy. In the 'Apéndice gráfi  co y matemático' the reader can learn about prices, fi  nancial circuits, analytic diagrams, variable distribution. Lázaro Carreter, in the prologue, estimates the book is a real encyclopaedia, 'un repertorio con el que los autores prestan un importante servicio a la lengua española'. The dictionary includes an initial index of abbreviations, it shows a thematic organization (expressions are distributed  in  topics  like  banking,  applied  economy,  management)  and provides two more term indexes (Spanish-English and English-Spanish) at the end. Its main drawbacks are that it does not distinguish the different PUs, and the use of abbreviations and indications ( E.i.:, R.U.) is not clear, so that you need from two to three steps to locate idioms: in the fi  nal index in English, I did not fi  nd sleeping partner, but I did fi  nd bear ('bajista') , bear hug ('abrazo del oso') , bear market ('mercado ´bear`'), bearish ('bajista'), blue chip (véase defi  nición 10 ). However, I also observed that idioms are accompanied by detailed encyclopaedic information as to the origin of some of them ( blue chip ):

## bear

bear hug, bearish

bear market Véase mercado bear

bearish

mercado 'bear' En la jerga bursátil norteamericana y, por extensión, en toda la mundial, la califi  cación de 'bear' (el oso) hace referencia al caso de rápidas bajas en la cotización de los valores, que pueden ser aprovechadas para volver a entrar en el mercado, o que pueden conducir a un largo estancamiento del mismo. E.i.: bear market.

10    The dictionary uses this formula instead of the translation equivalent to indicate that a term constitutes a borrowing in Spanish and to refer to its defi  nition in the Spanish section.

blue chip Véase defi  nición

blue chip En los países anglosajones y en el negocio bursátil, referencia a las acciones de las compañías más prestigiadas por la calidad y la amplia aceptación de sus productos o servicios, y por su capacidad prácticamente garantizada de generar dividendos, Tales acciones alcanzan normalmente precios altos, y ofrecen rendimientos relativamente bajos. El origen de este término es el nombre que en los EEUU se daba, por su color, a las fi  chas de póquer de más alto valor. Puede traducirse por 'valores punteros'.

## 3.3.  Multilingual Business Dictionaries

These are the less informative works. They present simple or compound lemmas, accompanied by their translation equivalents in as many columns as the languages considered, but just a few of them consider defi  nitions or phraseological information:

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1. The Diccionario  Económico,  Financiero  y Bursátil, español-inglés-francés (DEFBEI), by Cano Rico (1994), contains about 15,000 entries used in the fi  nancial environment in three basic languages: Spanish, English, and French. The book is divided into three sections, each of which comprises lemmas in a main language and their translation in the other two, so that it fi  nally contains almost 5,000 words in each language. It does not offer defi  nitions but only the translation equivalents of terms

and demonstrates a very limited conception of lexical units in general. The dictionary does not include references to semantically-related expressions or other classes of complementary lexical-grammatical information and it does not classify PUs. It offers four expressions related to bear market , and two possibilities for blue chip (among them a new construction: blue cheap leaders ),  but  does  not  contemplate sleeping partner or talk shop :

Bear bajista

Bear (to) the market

Bear market Mercado a la baja// mercado bajista// mercado replegado

Bear position,

Bearish - bajista Blue chips - canto dorado (valores de)// valores seguros Blue chip leaders valores destacados

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2. The Diccionario Multilingüe de Economía y Empresa (DMEE) (2000) includes approximately 2,000 specialized articles, intended for both foreign professionals and  students  of  superior  and  intermediate  levels.  The value of this work, if it is compared to the previous one, is  that  it  translates  terminology  to  the  four  main  languages of international economy and that it provides additional information in the fi  nal appendixes (international abbreviations and terms frequently used in business, main

international economic organizations, and frequent ab  bre  vi  ations in business correspondence in Spanish). The dictionary begins with the defi  nitions of concepts in Spanish that are followed by their translation in English, French, Italian, and German. The remainder of the dictionary is made up of four vocabularies: English-Spanish, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, and German-Spanish. The words appear in strict alphabetical order (articles and prepositions included), the different meanings of each  lemma  are  distinguished  with  numbers,  and  defi  nitions  include references in bold type to economic basic concepts. In my enquiries, I needed two searches: fi  rst I looked up the expressions in English to fi  nd their  Spanish  equivalents,  and  then  I  consulted  these  Spanish  defi  nitions to study the correspondence between the expressions in the two languages. The work presents the clearest defi  nitions of those studied that provide the lemma collocations in context. Nevertheless, the only lexical information I found are defi  nitions and translation equivalents. Idioms are not identifi  ed as such and the book does not include many of the metaphorical constructions analyzed (to be precise, blue chip, giltedged securities, talk shop ):

bear:

bajista (2)

bearish:

bajista (1)

bajista. (Ing. 1 bearish 2. bear // Fr. 1. à la baisse. 2. baissier // It. 1. al ribazo. 2. ribassista // Al. 1. Baisse-. 2. Baissespekulant, Baissier. 1. Estado de un Mercado en el que se espera la depreciación de un bien o valor , circunstancia que aumenta la presión vendedora. 2. Persona que ante la expectativa del descenso del precio de un bien o valor lo vende, confi  ando en comprarlo posteriormente para obtener así un benefi  cio .

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3. The Diccionario Capital de la Nueva Economía (DCNE) (2000)  is  composed  of  8,000  terms  defi  ned and translated into American and British English and French 11 . Actually, it is formed by a dictionary with defi  nitions in Spanish, translations into English and French, and two indexes (English-Spanish and French-Spanish). In that way, as I deal with the English expressions, again, I had to search idioms twice to  get  to  their  Spanish  defi  nition. The  work  selects

basic business terms together with some others from Internet and the new technologies industries. It is the only Spanish dictionary that has received the support of Lingua and Leonardo da Vinci (European Union programmes  to  disseminate  the  European  languages  in  executives´ training courses). The dictionary's purpose is to counteract the invasion of American business terms and the lack of precision in their use. In fact, the multidisciplinary team of eleven authors is in favour of adapting the Spanish terms in the translation of the English ones whenever possible, so that terms are clear and precise and contribute to the development and enrichment of the Spanish language. The positive results of this objective are refl  ected in the translation of blue chip that includes a possibility not considered up to the moment ( valor azul ):

bear market -

mercado bajista

bear spread

bearish -

bajista

mercado bajista / bear market / F: marché en baisse

Mercado cuyos precios y volúmenes de contratación están en situación

de descenso o a la baja. Predomina el pesimismo.

blue chip - valor azul

blue chips

- valores excedentes

blue - chip stock

- valor estrella

bluetooth

valor azul / blue chip / F: valeur vedette Traducción literal  equivalente  a  uno  de  los  valores  estrella  o  excelentes que se cotizan en una determinada bolsa.

11   The CD-ROM version also contains: German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Icelandic, Greek, and defi  nitions are also given in: English, French, German, and Italian.

valores excelentes / blue chips / F: valeurs vedettes, valeurs de fonds de portefeuille

Valores cotizados en una o más bolsas de comercio con gran capitalización y liquidez, correspondientes a empresas de primera clase, por lo  que ofrecen gran seguridad y liquidez. Tienen poca volatilidad y menos rentabilidad a corto plazo que los chicharros que son más especulativos. Estos valores confi  guran la mayor parte de las carteras de inversión. La denominación más correcta es valores estrella, aunque también se usa la expresión valores estrellas o punteros.

valor estrella / blue-chip stock / IB: blue-chip share/ F: valur étoile Valor con amplio respaldo del público e institucional que suele caracterizarse por una gran liquidez y seguridad y una tendencia de los benefi  cios y de la cotización al alza.

## 4. Conclusions. The treatment of idioms in business dictionaries

The monolingual business dictionaries (LDBE y ODBE), like the general monolingual  works,  do  not  indicate  the  classes  of  phraseological units,  but  mark  fi  gurative  meanings  and  accompany  idioms  with clear  defi  nitions  and  examples  (usually  contextualized).  Unlike  the gen  eral monolingual works and, contrary to what should be expected of  specialized  dictionaries,  the  books  published  in  English  show  the meta  phorical  constructions  with  a  high  degree  of  syntactic-semantic information: grammatical observations, register and subject-fi  eld labels, variants, information about the different meanings of polysemous and anto  nymous idioms, related phraseological units, and a complete system of cross-references. The limited focus of the books published in Spain (DTE, DAEM y DTEAF) leave much to be desired when compared to the pre  vious dictionaries, as they do not show phraseological, grammatical, pragmatic labelling, or contextual examples.

The bilingual business dictionaries, like the general bilingual ones, do not usually offer a defi  nition with idioms (with the exception of some of the works published in Spain), but are signifi  cant for this study because they include the polylexematic variants of expressions, followed by their translation equivalents. In this case the supremacy of the English lexicographical tradition that has been pointed out in the previous dictionaries is not observed, as I would emphasize, apart from an Anglo-Saxon work (SDBCF due to the great number of expressions it contains), two Spanish dictionaries (DTEFC because of the quality of its ar- ticles, and DBEE as it promotes those factors relevant to translation). As regards their treatment of phraseology, the bilingual specialized works present the following characteristics:

- These dictionaries do not normally identify the different types of phraseological units.
- They do not include as many idioms as they should.
- They not always contain the necessary information (orthographic, morphologic, semantic and functional) or contextual examples that help use a fi  gurative construction correctly.
- These resources do not use systematically typographical signs to distinguish the previous lexical categories.
- They offer several translation equivalents for the same idiom, but do not indicate the frequency of each or provide criteria that help the user choose the right one for a particular context.
- The Spanish and English sections are inconsistent, as they show different versions of idioms and their translation equivalents.

In spite of these limitations, some of the works investigated transmit a high degree of syntactic-semantic information by means of adequate typographical suggestions that could be applied to the microstructure of the ideal business dictionary:

- DTEFC presents a good treatment of phraseology (although idioms are not identifi  ed as such): each entry is made up of the lemma, a translation, an example, explanations for the translator and references to related words; a subject-fi  eld label is included; the different meanings of polysemous terms are differentiated with numbers; partial synonyms are followed by a comma and antonyms by a semicolon. The English-Spanish part has plenty of explanations, whereas the Spanish-English section favours synonyms and semantically-related words.
- SDBCF  offers  varied  lexical-collocational  information  in  italics  directed to text production and translation: subject-fi  eld labels, alphabetically-ordered, help choose the right translation; when an expression has several possible translations, the dictionary opts for the one experts consider more plausible; and a defi  nition or paraphrase is indicated with different typography when there is no direct equivalence.
- DBEE also pays great attention to the details that bring about a good translation: it offers the translation version preferred by economists or the great business glossaries; it tries to suggest as many translation equivalents as

possible and to propose a good equivalent for those constructions that still do not have a normalized one.

The multilingual business dictionaries do not offer defi  nitions of idioms, nor do they include cross-references to semantically-related expressions  or  other  complementary  lexical-grammatical  information (DEFBEI); therefore, their value resides in offering the translation equivalents of expressions in several languages. Some of them include wide encyclopaedic  knowledge  in  appendixes  (DMEE).  In  general,  these works show a limited conception of the phraseological units, as none of the books analyzed distinguishes their classes:

- DMEE contains more lexical information: the different meanings of an entry are differentiated with numbers; references in bold type to basic economic concepts are included and defi  nitions are clear and provide the lemma collocations in a context.
- DCNE is useful for translation: it recommends adapting the translations of English expressions to the Spanish morphology if the resulting constructions are clear, precise, and contribute to the enrichment of Spanish.

The present analysis ratifi  es the general defi  ciencies of specialized dictionaries that were pointed out by Ahmad et al. (1995) and the appendix of the Pointer Report (section 3: 85). These works do not always include phraseology; they do not often show a defi  nition with the lexical units, and when they do, it shows varying degrees of quality and clarity; the defi  nition and encyclopaedic information are not enough to satisfy the users´ needs; and these dictionaries do not incorporate enough lexical or grammatical information either, so that the user will not know the syntactic behaviour of a term or expression, or which translation equivalent to choose when several possibilities are given.

To solve these defi  ciencies, the specialized resources should copy the general (Fraile Vicente, In press c) and phraseological (Fraile Vicente, In press d) dictionaries that accompany idioms of generous lexico-semantic information categories (orthographic, semantic and grammatical indications) that guide the less expert user to the more adequate translation suggestion. Nevertheless, the result of this evolution is an article more and more complex, so that the main problem of the lexicographer becomes how to reconcile the lack of space in the dictionary with the enormous quantity of information he wants to introduce and in such a way that users know how to fi  nd it. Usually, the content is presented with abbreviations, symbols and other typographical conventions that occupy less space but, at the same time, make reading diffi  cult if they are not used in a clear and systematic way (Hastings, 2000: 111-113).

All things considered, a new type of dictionary is suggested that treats both idioms and other related phraseological units. It is hoped that, in the near future, joint research by lexicographers and phraseologers will enable them to discover the new categories of PUs that are now being surmised and enable them to describe conveniently their meaning, written and oral form, syntactic and pragmatic functions. Moreover, dictionaries should count on more fl  exible access to information, versions in electronic format and CD-Rom that allow rapid and simple data access.

Electronic programs offer new opportunities, unexplored up to now, for the study of phraseology and idiomaticity at all levels. In this sense, I am in favour of a specialized lexicography which constitutes a bridge between lexicography and terminology, so that the products of the three related disciplines (general dictionaries in lexicology, specialized dictionaries in lexicography and databases in terminology) can benefi  t mutually (Fraile Vicente, 2005: 430). Many of the limitations I have pointed out could be solved if LSP dictionaries were organized conceptually and not alphabetically. Certainly, specialized lexicography should break away from the traditional semasiological orientation and opt for a mixed methodology: a lexicographical approach that considers the units from the general language that form part of the specialized discourse, and a terminographical view that represents the vocabulary conceptually and reveals the relationship between concepts (Cabré Castellví 1993; Cartagena 1996 and Picht 1995 apud Tercedor Sánchez 1999: §3.1).

Translators fi  nd a terminographical approach to the lexicogra  phical entries  built  around  concepts  more  useful  because  these  professionals work with words but translate concepts (Bononno, 2000: 650-652). Every specialized dictionary should be based on the conceptual knowledge that is vital for the translator to disambiguate the text and structure his version conveniently, as this professional is accustomed to fi  nding the original terms without a descriptive context, or more reference than the text, that can be either illuminating or ambiguous. The conceptual structure of a domain guides the selection of the lexical units to be included in the dictionary, places each of them inside a structured set, and allows one to delimit their meaning, to associate terms and identify the most suitable equivalent in the target language (Gómez González-Jover & Vargas Sierra, 2004: §5). Besides, the dictionary is the typical resource used by translators but not the only one. Other linguistic tools such as text corpora and terminological databases can be used independently or combined (Palomares Perrault y Pinto, 2000: 98-124).

## Bibliography

## Monolingual, bilingual and multilingual Business Dictionaries

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- (DTFI) - Mochón Morcillo, F. & R. Isidro Aparicio 1998: Diccionario de términos fi  nancieros y de inversión . 2ª ed. Madrid: McGraw-Hill.

- (ESBD) - Gil Esteban, R. 2000: English-Spanish Banking Dictionary, diccionario bancario español-inglés . Madrid: Paraninfo.
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## General Bibliography

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- Fraile Vicente, E. (In press a): Are the Typical Errors in the Translation of Business Idioms somehow Motivated by their Lexicographical Treatment?
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