BUSINESS COMMUNICATION: GLOBALIZATION, BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT

The seminar is organized into fourteen weeks, each week tackling a topic specific to the fields of macro, microeconomics or finances. The texts for each week are chosen in such a way that students should become familiarized both with basic concepts of Business English as well as with concepts that are linked to the history of economy and realities of the contemporary world in general. This in turn can help them better contextualize new economic terms. Thus, each seminar is organized into sections: Section 1, Theoretical concepts explained, which is made up of one text dealing with a particular topic followed by a section which explains the concepts used in the text as well as other concepts or terms that are typical of that particular topic. This section is usually followed by a free discussion on the topic introduced by the primary text. Section 2, Vocabulary Study, encompasses a wide variety of lexical exercises meant to practice the various terms and concepts introduced in the text. Section 3, Translation Practice, focuses on translation exercises from English into Romanian and from Romanian into English, having the same objective, namely that of employing the newly explained terms and concepts, by offering excerpts from specialized newspapers and magazines.

What the seminar offers:

1. Bearing in mind that specialized language and terminology sometimes sounds completely foreign to the lay person, focus is laid on formal equivalence of the concepts under discussion and explanations for Romanian speakers;
2. Lexical problems are introduced in such a way that the lexical difficulties of Business English are presented from the point of view of the Romanian speaker, focus being laid on: false friends, lexical gaps, synonymy, homonymy, polysemy which are always problematic with non-native speakers.

The novelty of this seminar lies in the use of text excerpts in both English and Romanian for translation practice, following the explanation and practice of the new concepts so that students are left not only with a good comprehension of the terms under discussion but also with additional background information on the topic introduced in the primary text.