BUSINESS TERMINOLOGY - INTERNATIONAL AND/OR NATIONAL?

The complex notion of cultural identity comprises various areas of social life which all produce linguistic reflections in the form of sets of relevant terminology. Namely, professional registers and terminology, including business and economics in general, imply lexical items specific to a given field, concepts sometimes originating in a specific culture or social system, but which are transferred to other cultures and other languages. This is also the case with the business/economic register, especially if one bears in mind the socio-political changes in Eastern Europe (and other regions) during and after the period of economic transition. The paper would thus point to some lexical/terminological characteristics of the former "self-management" economic system in Serbia, then to the new terminology which entered the language in the period of transition and the present linguistic solutions related to market economy. Therefore, the first part of the paper briefly discusses typical examples from a bilingual Serbian/Croatian-English dictionary of self-management terminology, published during and at the end of that period (1978, 1979, 1989), and the second part discusses lexical and lexicographic issues related to new terminology introduced during the period of transition and after that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]