Anglicism from IT in multilingual corpora. The role of translation in language for specific purposes.

Translation plays a key role in Language for Specific Purposes, especially in the field of Information Technology (IT). User guides for software and hardware products are usually written in English, and then released as translated textes in many languages. This often leads to the introduction of anglicisms. In this paper frequency and treatment of anglicisms are analysed in a cross-linguistic perspective, by comparing data in French, German, Russian and Spanish. The analysis is based on the observation of two multilingual corpora. The paper first discusses whether any relationship exists between translators' and non specialists' use of loanwords in each corpus, and then the correlations between such use of anglicisms and different language policies.