KudoZ: term help for translators

The KudoZ network provides a framework for translators and others to assist each other with translations or explanations of terms and short phrases.

Spanish term

neilmac

Spain

1875 questions

Ministerio de Economía y Empresa

Spanish to English Social Sciences Government / Politics Names of ministries and departments

SPAIN. You'd think it would be easy to find an official, or at least quasi-official translation for such an important ministry.

Google says "Ministry of Economy and Business"... But I'm wondering if that's definitive. And the translations available on official websites tend to be MT.

"Estructura y Competencias
Corresponde al Ministerio de Economía y Empresa la propuesta y ejecución de la política del Gobierno en materia económica y de reformas para la mejora de la competitividad, de desarrollo industrial, de telecomunicaciones y sociedad de la información, de desarrollo de la Agenda Digital así como la política de apoyo a la empresa, y el resto de competencias y atribuciones que le confiere el ordenamiento jurídico."

Proposed translations (English)

5 +4	Ministry of Economy and Business	Cecilia Q Clare
4	Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs	Larissa Timm

Change log

Apr 23, 2019 09:48: writeaway changed "Language pair" from "English" to "Spanish to English"

Votes to reclassify question as PRO/non-PRO:

Non-PRO (1): Yvonne Gallagher

When entering new questions, KudoZ askers are given an opportunity^* to classify the difficulty of their questions as 'easy' or 'pro'. If you feel a question marked 'easy' should actually be marked 'pro', and if you have earned more than 20 KudoZ points, you can click the "Vote PRO" button to recommend that change.

How to tell the difference between "easy" and "pro" questions:

An easy question is one that any bilingual person would be able to answer correctly. (Or in the case of monolingual questions, an easy question is one that any native speaker of the language would be able to answer correctly.)

A pro question is anything else... in other words, any question that requires knowledge or skills that are specialized (even slightly).

Another way to think of the difficulty levels is this: an easy question is one that deals with everyday conversation. A pro question is anything else.

When deciding between easy and pro, err on the side of pro. Most questions will be pro.

* Note: non-member askers are not given the option of entering 'pro' questions; the only way for their questions to be classified as 'pro' is for a ProZ.com member or members to re-classify it.

Discussion

neilmac (asker) Apr 24, 2019: Re: Google results Thanks for the input, peeps. Note that I didn't say those Google results actually meant anything - I'm not fighting any battles here - it was me who posted the query! However, I think the discussion shows that there is more to it than meets the (non-pro?) eye. I have no issue with using whatever appears on the government sites.
Robert Carter Apr 24, 2019: @Charles That's perfect, thank you very much for explaining it so well. I had assumed it meant just that "entrepreneurial economic activity". In fact, I would have imagined the title referred to a ministry that promotes enterprise and competition in the sense of being for entrepreneurial activity and against monopolies. I fully agree with your comments on Google results, I've mentioned it myself a number of times in response to peer comments highlighting them to support an argument one way or the other. Most Google results, even for very common one-word searches, tend to stop at around 30 pages, so results in the millions are meaningless. I've just Googled "ministry" and after the initially estimated 1.5 billion results, it only yields 29 pages.
Charles Davis Apr 24, 2019: @Neil Watch it with those Google results. The number announced at the top of the first page is an estimate, and nearly always a wild over-estimate. Björn Vrooman posted a useful link on this in a recent question. "Ministry of Economy and Enterprise" + "Spain" actually gets 80 results; "Ministry of Economy and Business" + "Spain" gets 113. So yes, some people are using "Enterprise" (with which, as I say, I personally don't agree), though not quite as many as are using "Business". In any case, I would never decide on a translation on the basis of those numbers alone, certainly not without looking at who is using each option, for a start.
Charles Davis Apr 24, 2019: Competitiveness On this other point you raised, Robert, I think that what they meant by "competitividad" in the former name of this ministry is making the Spanish business sector competitive, which is not the same thing as market competition or antitrust regulation, though the former is the arena in which competitiveness is manifested and the latter is a means of achieving it. In other words, it referred to the quality of being competitive.
Charles Davis Apr 24, 2019: @Robert and Meridy The word "enterprise", as a count noun, denotes a (commercial) company, i.e., an empresa (which can also be, and often is, called a business), but in "Ministry of Enterprise" the word "enterprise" will be taken in its sense as a non-count noun, meaning entrepreneurial economic activity. While this ministry doubtless sees part of its function as fostering enterprise in that sense, it is not one of the meanings of "empresa" in Spanish. Enterprise in the sense of entrepreneurial activity (at least in European Spanish) is emprendimiento or espíritu/iniciativa (etc.) emprendedor(a) (though I see emprendedurismo quite a lot too): https://www.fundeu.es/recomendacion/emprendimiento-no-empren... The only relevant meaning of "empresa" is "unidad de organización dedicada a actividades industriales, mercantiles o de prestación de servicios con fines lucrativos" (DLE 2), and I'm sure that's they mean: "empresa" is being used to mean "empresas": the business sector/world (somewhat in the way you use "la mujer" to mean women in general, for example). I don't think "negocios" would be suitable; that's business in the sense of the nuts and bolts of business activity.
Robert Carter Apr 24, 2019: @Meridy Thanks, but just to be clear, I'm not suggesting it's wrong at all, I'm just interested in the perceived differences.
Meridy Lippoldt Apr 24, 2019: I agree with Robert. The World Bank translation of "empresa" is "enterprise." Ministry of Industry and Commerce also exists as a separate entity of the Spanish Government in addition to "Ministerio de Economía y Empresa."
Robert Carter Apr 24, 2019: @Charles Just out of interest, why do you think "enterprise" is not the right slant? While I don't have any problem with your suggestion, "business" is a non-standard translation for "empresa", and if you're right that it relates to "business", then I'm wondering why the Ministry prefers "empresa" to "negocios". Btw, I agree with preferring "competitiveness" over "competivity," but I also feel that "market competition" or "antitrust regulation" would be more useful translations in the case you've cited.
Meridy Lippoldt Apr 24, 2019: Other possibilities might be Ministry of Economics and Industry or Ministry of Economics and Commerce
Charles Davis Apr 23, 2019: Personally I've always used "competitiveness" rather than "competitivity". "Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness" is what the Spanish government's English websites and many other people used to call this ministry, and I think that's what I've used myself when it's come up.
Luis M. Sosa Apr 23, 2019: @Neil I was wondering about the existence of the word 'competitivity'. I have never come across with it, as opposed to competitiveness, which is widely used in books, working papers and in the financial press. Could not find it in: the Blackwell Dictionary of Finance, the Enciclopedic Dictionary of Finance, The World Bank Glossary. However I found it in the Cambridge Dictionary [https://dictionary.cambridge.org/es/diccionario/ingles/compe...]. I go with competitiveness
neilmac (asker) Apr 23, 2019: The query (which I'm fuming about being marked as NON-PRO)arose out of idle curiosity. The text I'm actually working on mentions the "Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness", the forerunner of the current ministry. My colleague was saying that she preferred "competitivity", although it does not appear in many dictionaries. Not being keen on either competitivity/competitiveness, I ended up leaving the name of the defunct ministry in Spanish.
neilmac (asker) Apr 23, 2019: @Charles I rarely use "enterprise" myself, but it's widely used in the UK so I thought it might be more appropriate here. Some sources do use "enterprise" - a search for "Ministry of economy and enterprise" gets 117,000 results.
Luis M. Sosa Apr 23, 2019: Fully agree with Charles
Charles Davis Apr 23, 2019: By the way, translations on Spanish government websites are not faultless but I don't think they're usually MT, though some may be.
Charles Davis Apr 23, 2019: @Neil The Moncloa site, which is about as official as it gets, calls it the Ministry of Economy and Business: http://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/lang/en/gobierno/news/Paginas/20... I don't think there's anything wrong with it as a translation, and indeed it would be difficult to think of anything else as suitable (unless you used "Enterprise" for Empresa, but I don't think that's the right slant). It's a pretty new name; it's only been called that since June 2018.