RT Journal Article
T1 Spanish-to-German Translations of Olive Oil Export Company Websites: a Focus on Geographical Indication and Olive Oil Category terminology
A1 Limbach, Christiane
K1 Spanish-German website localisation
K1 Economic translation
K1 Extra-virgin olive oil
K1 Protected designation of origin (PDO)
K1 Protected geographical indication (PGI)
AB According to a report by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing and Nutrition (2022), olive oil accounted for a total turnover of 148.39 million euros in 2021, making olive oil Spain’s fifth agricultural product in terms of sales volume. Approximately one third of all production is exported, Germany leading European exports with 258 tons (t) of olive oil. Product descriptions must be translated for foreign markets, and in this case, particular attention must be paid to the terms used to describe olive oil quality, notably the geographical indications and olive oil categories. Terminological research (Ibañez Rodríguez, 2003) is thus a key dimension of translation here: the selected words must be recognisable by potential foreign customers, and they must be in line with the terminology established by the European Commission. In this study, we worked on a corpus of websites of Andalusian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in both German and Spanish. These SMEs all actively produced and sold olive oil and had an EU geographical indication register. In order to analyse how geographical indications and olive oil categories were translated from Spanish into German and to determine whether EU terminology was applied, we used the Sketch Engine programme. We found a wide range of translations which were potentially creating misunderstandings and raising doubts in the minds of German consumers.
PB HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business
YR 2025
FD 2025-12-06
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10433/26020
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10433/26020
LA en
NO Hermes, nº 65, 99-114
NO This project was financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and by the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge, Business and University of the Andalusia Government within the framework of the FEDER Andalusia 2014-2020 operational programme, specific objective 1.2.3. "Promotion and generation of frontier knowledge and knowledge oriented to the challenges of society, development of emerging technologies" within the framework of the reference research project UPO-1265425, ERDF co-financing percentage 80%.
NO Universidad Pablo de Olavide. Departamento de Filología y Traducción
DS RIO
RD May 22, 2026