The use of English initialisms and abbreviations in the field of pharmaceutical business communication in Spanish

Abstract

The present paper deals with the use of English initialisms and abbreviations in the professional field of pharmaceutical business communication in Spanish. This specialized area has not yet been previously examined, and the use of initialisms and abbreviations is becoming more and more extended. The corpus consisted in an up-to-date list of thirty-seven shortened forms, which was extracted from a digital magazine addressed to pharmacists. In order to document the use of the initialisms, acronyms and abbreviations examined in Spanish, a combined analysis was carried out: firstly, the above mentioned list of initialisms and acronyms from the online magazine www.correofarmaceutico.com provided evidence about their use in written language; and secondly, the twenty-one pharmacists who answered our questionnaire provided data about practitioners' familiarity with and the actual usage of these lexical items.