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Description
Electronic financial glossaries have proliferated in Spain and Spanish America, as well as in other world regions, with the surge of globally encouraged national financial education strategies over the last couple of decades (OECD/CAF, 2020). Among the resources available on the websites of financial institutions such as central banks and commercial banks, monolingual glossaries emerge with the aim of explaining financial and economic concepts in plain language to non-expert users. They are thus what the Function Theory of Lexicography dubs knowledgeoriented lexicographic tools (Bergenholtz & Tarp, 1995; Fuertes-Olivera, 2010; Fuertes-Olivera & Tarp, 2014).
Recent investigations in this field (Rocha-Ochoa, in press) show that glossaries developed by central banks in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries are enormously heterogeneous in terms of their size, structure and thematic content, and do not always reflect their intended goals. In addition, they limit themselves to a rather basic use of internet technologies and lack actualization. Commercial banks have developed glossaries as part of financial education initiatives, albeit their goals and motivations might differ from those of central banks (Kalmi & Ruuskanen, 2022), but such lexicographic resources remain unexplored in the scope of lexicographic enquiry.
The four Spanish-speaking countries represented in this study –Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain– offer a set of comparable financial education materials, given that the eleven selected glossaries stem both from central banks and from local branches of two commercial banks: Santander and BBVA. Over thirty six hundred lemmas and definitions were classified, analysed and compared. The comparative analysis revealed tendencies among countries and institutions regarding the arrangement, thematic domain and level of specialisation, as well as in the proportion and of acronyms and anglicisms. For example, commercial bank glossaries tend to present a more polished structure and contain more
IT terminology and more anglicisms than those from central banks. Similarly, although the presence of acronyms might be higher in central bank glossaries, such abbreviated units fall within different domains from those found in commercial bank glossaries. The findings not only underscore the variation across banks and countries, but also shed light on diatopic variation within financial terminology in Spanish.
