Interlingual transfer of social media terminology. A case study based on a corpus of English, Spanish and Brazilian newspaper articles

Abstract

This article addresses the terminology used in the field of social media, a new field introduced by recent technological advances. As social media was first created in an English-speaking context, speakers of other languages have had to develop ways to express the concepts of this field in their own languages. It is thus relevant for translators and journalists to understand the linguistic means by which the transfer of such concepts occurs. In order to achieve this, a comparable corpus of newspaper articles on social media (Facebook and WhatsApp) written in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese was compiled and the procedures used by Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish journalists to convey frequently-used English terms were examined. The main translation procedures observed in the study are equivalence, calque, loan and paraphrase. Although most procedures occur in the texts written in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, their frequency of use indicates linguistic preferences in the languages.