The influence of English on Spanish fashion terminology: -ing forms

As has been the case with other European languages, Spanish has welcomed the arrival of English words, in spite of all purist efforts to the contrary. Moreover, it has not only adopted and adapted true Anglicisms but it has also created other forms based on English patterns, such mechanisms particularly visible in the fashion jargon in Spanish. In this paper we focus on -ing forms in the Spanish language of fashion, which may at times be genuine Anglicisms (formal or semantic ones) or false Anglicisms (analogical creations, that is, English-looking lexical elements), found in Spanish editions of fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle, InStyle, Grazia, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan. The main aim of this study is to qualitatively analyse and classify -ing Anglicisms and false Anglicisms in the aforementioned jargon in order to establish whether the impact of English in the Spanish fashion jargon is so important as to replace native words and expressions.

La Validación Lingüística en los Principales Cuestionarios de Salud y Calidad de Vida

The goals of this article are to summarize the problems and solutions found in translating seven Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) questionnaires from English into Spanish which have used a common international protocol based on back-translation techniques. The methodology used is based on the linguistic validation model including both the linguistic and the sociopragmatic equivalence. Five questionnaires from seven have obtained good results, not so two of them. Considering linguistic questions, there were more problems than good solutions on the lexical-semantic level. With respect to the sociocultural questions, there were more solutions than problems. The Spanish translated questionnaires still present deficiencies to be corrected, so both linguistic and sociocultural questions have to be studied more carefully in order not to allow differences between the translated versions and the source questionnaires.

Anglicisms and calques in upper social class in pre-revolutionary Cuba (1930–1959): A sociolinguistic analysis

The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902–1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, Diario de la Marina, and the corresponding elaboration of a corpus of English-induced loanwords. Diario de la Marina particularly targeted upper social class, and only crónicas sociales (society pages’ columns) and print advertising were revised because of their fully descriptive texts, which encoded the ruling class ideology and consumerism. The findings show that there existed a high number of lexical and cultural anglicisms in the sociolect in question, and that the sociolinguistic anglicization was openly embraced by the upper socioeconomic stratum, entailing a differentiating sign of sophistication and social stratification. Likewise, a number of the anglicisms collected, particularly those related with social events, are unused in contemporary Cuban Spanish, which suggests a major semantic shifting in this sociolect after 1959.