The Use of Anglicisms in the Italian and Ukrainian Tech Publications

As an Italian and English Translation Major our research interests lie primarily in the area of comparative linguistics and especially in the age of technological development, it is highly significant to understand how much English as the language of international communication affects other languages. That’s why we chose and investigated this phenomenon. 

 

The present research is dedicated to the comparative analysis of loanwords from English and how they have transformed into other languages. In earlier studies, namely in the Master’s Dissertation A.-M. Björkenval, Anglicisms were considered not as a potential threat to the language but as a result of globalization. In our research we aim to show the detrimental effect of the English borrowings related to the technical sphere on the Ukrainian and Italian languages. It should be said that this problem is concerned not only with the languages under consideration, but also reflects the evolution of a language in general, which does not always occur naturally. The research methods include sampling and comparative analysis to single out Anglicisms in Ukrainian and Italian technical texts, and identify their differences and similarities. The results obtained enable to see how the borrowings affect the development and the language itself as a whole. 

 

We conducted the research on the basis of the Italian website https://www.digitalic.it/ that covers news from the world of electronics. Since we are translators and this is a great opportunity to see if there is a difference in the transition of Anglicisms in Italian and English, we translated the texts from Italian into Ukrainian, and came to the conclusion that most words are simply transliterated from English, and sometimes do not change their structure at all. These are, for instance, words such as the names of social networks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. The results show that due to the appearance of new words in English people lose the need to invent new words in their own languages. For example, such words as smartphone, Internet, video have not absolutely changed their form. After analyzing only 3 publications, I found as many as 28 words that were proceeded from English.

Therefore the influence of Anglicisms on other languages is very high, not only in colloquial speech, but also in writing. It is known that the rapid turnover of Anglicisms occurred in the 1950s, as confirmed by A New Dictionary of Italian Anglicisms: the Aid of Corpora. The consequences of this influence can be irreversible, because with the rapid technological development and the introduction of English words into everyday life, we can come to the fact that other languages will consist of more than half of borrowings, which is the reason for the destruction of the language’s structure itself.