French-Spanish and Spanish-French economic translation Survey on texts and translated domains

The aim of this paper is to identify the texts and domains that business translators usually translate from French into Spanish and vice versa. First, we briefly review the literature on business translation (surveys conducted among professional translators and studies written by scholars in the context of French and Spanish). Although this review gives us an indication of, for example, the kind of documents or domains to which some translator trainers expose their students, or the position of business translation among other types of translation such as legal, technical or literary translation, it does not give us an in-depth understanding of the Spanish market. For this reason we conducted a survey to find out more about business texts and domains. We present our survey-based study, describe the participants and identify the texts and domains that are most often translated. The results point to differences not only in the texts and domains, but also as far as the language combinations are concerned. The results are thus useful in helping translator trainers both to design specialised business translation courses or course modules and as the basis for further research on contrastive analysis of business genres.