Termes i moda: una proposta per al català

Abstract

Fashion is a field of specialization, which possesses its own terminology. Terms are created everyday due to the new realities that constantly appear in fashion world. The problem is that it does not exist any normalization for this terminology. Another problem lies in the fact that English is the working language used by the experts in this area and, although there are also fashion publications in other languages, such as French, Italian or Spanish, this list does not include Catalan. From this point, we chose a number of fashion magazines in Spanish and English and we did a terminology extraction from which we selected 24 terms to study. This paper shows the analysis we performed for each term based on the normalization process we created, consisting in four parts: presentation of the term, which includes origin, meaning and motivation; analysis of its documented uses, which presents the contexts where it was found; pros and cons of each possibility, which are based in the linguistic, terminological, and sociolinguistic aspects described in the paper; and the final proposal with its argumentation, built from the pros and cons. At the end, we have been able to establish a fashion terminological proposal for the Catalan language. Our findings show that the influence of English language in fashion terminology is very significant and that natural word formation resources are different between Catalan and English linguistic systems: Catalan uses loanwords and a special kind of compounding while English prefers compounding. Also, the paper implies the necessity of further studies in fashion terminology with more significant data to affirm these conclusions.