On the boundaries of special languages for translation of university management documents: Spanish-Russian

Research on special languages is approached from different perspectives: lexical, morphosyntactic and textual; for different purposes: language teaching, terminology, translation, or communication between specialists; and with methodologies and techniques from different disciplines, which makes it challenging to establish the limits of the field of study. From the point of view of translation, one of the key issues is establishing clear and well-defined boundaries of specialized texts to transfer both terminological and stylistic aspects to the target text. Therefore, this work aims to contribute to the research on the relationship between translation and special languages in Russian and Spanish by studying the language of the university management context after the Bologna Process, and then shed light on the establishment of the domain boundaries in special languages. The vast production of technical documents, reports, declarations, manuals, annual reports, institutional agreements raises the following complementary objectives of this research: to define the relevant role of translation in the specialized communication process, and present a delimitation of the conceptual field adapted to the translator’s needs. Therefore, we start from the premise that the detailed study of the characteristics of university terminology in both educational systems will help to solve some of the gaps in the specialized Spanish-Russian university domain. Therefore, the first section of the paper presents the theoretical background shared by the study of special languages, terminology and translation to conclude that identifying the conceptual field is crucial for the three disciplines. The second part of the paper presents the results of a textual and terminological study that highlights the main problems of equivalence between the language of university management in Spanish and Russian, and especially the difficulties of clearly delimiting the scope of the special language due to the number of areas that converge in this field along with the variety of documents generated.