(UN)QUESTIONABLE USE OF ANGLICISMS IN ROMANIAN COMPUTERESE
(UN)QUESTIONABLE USE OF ANGLICISMS IN ROMANIAN COMPUTERESE

Summary/Abstract: In recent years, due to the fact that, on the one hand, English has become a lingua franca ofcommunication, being all-pervasive in fields such as economics, business, IT or medicine and, on theother hand, to the fact that technology has evolved at a very fast pace, new specialised terms haveemerged in order to accommodate this rapid change, which more often than not do not have equivalentsin other languages. The present paper is intended to present the influence that English has had over thespecialised terminology in the field of computer science, focusing on the English language as a primarysource for a great number of lexical and morphological innovations in the Romanian informationtechnology-related vocabulary. The paper will demonstrate that, although the use of Anglicisms may bethe only solution due to the untranslatability of the specialised computer science terms in some cases,there are also instances in which the respective terms can either be translated or have a phonetically andorthographically adapted Romanian equivalent. The conclusion of the study is that the Romanianlanguage displays a natural general disposition towards adopting and adapting borrowed informationtechnology terms to the detriment of their perfectly functional Romanian equivalents. Most often, thetranslation of the specialised terms occurs when the respective word is used by and widely known to thegeneral public, whereas the very specialised English terms are adopted as such when they refer to specificbranches of IT.

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