English terminology in international trade: French dictionaries perspective

Abstract

Brazil has a strong trading relationship with several countries, including France, which has intensified these links in recent years and intends to do so yet further. Legal documents regulate this operation, resulting in a set of terms which designate concepts specific to this area. Communication between Brazilian and French buyers and sellers is intense and does not permit the occurrence of errors in understanding orders for merchandise nor in terms of purchase and sale. It is therefore very important that agents of International Trade between Brazil and France should have access to a specialised terminographic tool in the area, containing the relevant terms used in French and Portuguese. This type of work does not currently exist; we therefore decided to make a contribution and draw up a proposal for a bilingual French-Portuguese dictionary in this specialised area. During our research, we registered a significant presence of English terms in International Trade texts originally written in Portuguese and in French, which may be explained by the fact that English currently has the role of global lingua franca. However, it is well known that France operates a policy of linguistic protectionism, making the use of French obligatory in all sectors of activity in France. This generated an area of doubt: how should one deal with English terms in a bilingual French-Portugese dictionary? In order to begin the search for an answer to this question, we decided to see what treatment was given to English terms in the area of International Trade in some French dictionaries. In this paper we shall present the principal results obtained during our research.