Job-hunting in Italy : Building a glossary of “English-inspired” job titles

This paper reports on a study of “English-inspired” job titles retrieved from a specialized corpus of job advertisements posted on Italian web pages. This corpus was created using the WebBootCat tool in the Sketch Engine, following the methodology described by Baroni and Bernardini (2004) and Baroni et al. (2006). The aim is to build a glossary of English job titles to be published online as a tool for prospective job applicants. Checking their status in English and Italian dictionaries, we will establish whether the titles collected are current English terms, false Anglicisms, or “English-inspired” creations. The preliminary findings consist of a list of 30 job titles which are analyzed in terms of form and meaning, and grouped into categories depending on whether an Italian equivalent is available or not. The corpus of job postings is used to analyze the lexical profile of job titles, their meaning and/or possible covert manipulative intent. In fact, data shows that some English job titles may be preferred to Italian equivalents to attribute greater status to the actual job designation and description. Moreover, some job titles are characterized by complex pre-modification which may confuse the ultimate users, i.e. job hunters themselves.