Diccionario comercial español-inglés, inglés español: El secretario; compilación al día de todos los términos y expresiones para la correspondencia comercial, española-inglesa, inglesa-española / por Alejandro Frías – Sucre Giraud
This commercial (business) dictionary in my evaluation has shown to be very limited and unreliable in its presentation at the same time defining many words that are in an antiquated way that is out of date. This specific version was copyrighted in 1940 and published in 1977 (for this version, edition 5.807).
The dictionary is also available in the editions which were printed in the years of 1949, 1981, 1984, 1985, and 1990. It is available in Google Boooks online in scanned versions for the versions of 1990, 1981, and 1940.
Even five versions of this book exist, this is a small number since the dictionary has was first published in 1940. It has not been updated since 1990 and is not even listed any longer in the publishers website, evident that it is no longer being produced for circulation in the market. They are found in a very limited quantity, usually with a single book in stock in various different sites that show up on Google very randomly, many out of stock. The book can be found for sale at around $4.00 per book. It has been found in three different countries according to my searches; The United States, Canada, and Spain – all of them in the same limited quantity, most of them used of course, some claim to have it in new condition.
The publisher was founded in 1923 in Barcelona Spain where it is still located to this day. Its website contains many books in the category of dictionaries, classics, children’s books, biographies, history, gastronomy and others. Even though that is a wide variety of books in its website, the website is poor, as it looks lke it was cheaply made and in more than 90 years of existence, it would be expected that there would be more publications then just these. The website looks poor in its presentation as seen here http://www.editorialjuventud.es/
The author “Alejandro Frías – Sucre Giraud” is almost completely unknown and shows up as only having publish this one dictionary and one other book which the title can be found even more randomly than the dictionary, however there is not even a description of what the book is about.
Reviews for this publisher were hard to find. This one was the only one possible to be obtained … http://www.statscrop.com/www/editorialjuventud.es, which gives a rating of #1,172,321 in the world, which does not mean much since the review site is also poor and does not explain what guidelines it follows in making this assessment – it only states that a smaller number means high volume of visits which tells me nothing if it does not state how many sites were evaluated. The website is worth $1,498 and its revenue is of $4.00 per day. The publisher does not even have a Wikipedia page. Its Facebook page has only 2, 482 likes. It is cited very few times. This is disappointing in relation to the fact that it has 347,000 results on Google search, but they repeat themselves many times.
This dictionary could have been used in three following instances if it was reliable in accordance with its field ( or at least the field that it was initially intended to address):
- A translator in the New York stock exchange may want to send technical information in a letter about stocks and bonds and inform a person in Spanish, such as in the stock market of Spain about the profit that was made in capital in relation to these specific stocks.
- A person may want to know commercial/ business terms in order to refer to a colleague who will be traveling from the United States to Spain and that has been assigned to work in a Real Estate company and explain what his qualifications are in this area.
3. A scholar might be in need to translate his essay in Economics and may need some technical terms that address economic concepts.
However, as already mentioned, none of these cases above may be done correctly since the dictionary is of very poor quality and does not perform according to what its intended purpose should be. This dictionary is old, contains definitions that are outdated such as describing the word “value” and its use in context of “value in cash” as “pago en metálica” which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and has definitions of simple words such as the word “pencil” which are irrelevant and unnecessary to be in a technical dictionary, as the word is completely basic. In addition the dictionary is very small, for example for the translation of the words with the letter “v” from English to Spanish there is only a page and a half of definitions and the book is quite small (4″ by 9″ or so).
This dictionary was easy to retrieve and locate at Baruch College, however as it is seen in the search it is not easily found everywhere and may be hard to obtain and take long times to ship if found as seen in the websites that came up when doing a Google search.
