FITNESS TERMS IN ENGLISH AND THEIR ADAPTATION INTO SERBIAN
FITNESS TERMS IN ENGLISH AND THEIR ADAPTATION INTO SERBIAN

Summary/Abstract: Having gained enormous popularity since the 1980s, “fitness” has become one of the most widespread words when used in relation to physical exercise, beneficial for both physical and mental health. Since the worldwide emergence of fitness coincided with the English language used as the lingua franca, many fitness terms were taken from English and adapted into other languages. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse fitness terminology in English and different ways of adapting it into Serbian. The corpus used for the research consists of 200 fitness terms in English and their Serbian translation equivalents, collected from relevant literature in both languages. According to the results, there are four different procedures employed when transferring terms from English into Serbian – transshaping, direct translation, structural translation, and functional approximation. Furthermore, findings show a significant number of variant forms of the terms used in Serbian, which is a clear indicator of the necessity of their standardisation. Therefore, one of the primary goals in the field of sports terminology should be to compile a register of fitness terms in English and Serbian and analyse it within the contrastive linguistics framework, in order to set future guidelines for its standardisation and possible inclusion into an updated version of Novi englesko-srpski rečnik sportskih termina [A New English-Serbian Dictionary of Sports Terms] (Milić et al., 2021) planned for the future.

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