Characterization of Leather Industry Terminology

In the current context of Spanish economic activity, there has been a notable increase in the production of multilingual terminological works of various artisanal and industrial sectors. The increasing international commercial transactions have stimulated collaborative research efforts across diverse fields of knowledge. It is under this multidisciplinary framework that the present contribution is located, which attempts to address the terminological characterization of the language of leather goods in Spanish, as a first step towards a multilingual work. The main objective is to comprehensively describe the vocabulary employed in the artisanal sector in Ubrique from a lexicogenetic approach. To accomplish this goal, we have contextualized the historical and social dimensions of the leather industry in this town of Cadiz, since it has played an important historical role as the epicenter of the production of leather goods, distinguished by the excellence and precision of its work. On the other hand, the basis for the extraction of the approximately 1 900 terms analyzed has been a combination of monolingual (Spanish) and mixed textual corpus composed of both written and oral texts of approximately 580 000 words. The results of this analysis show that the vocabulary of leather industry is characterized by its artisanal and traditional essence, which has hardly undergone significant industrial development. This implies, on the one hand, the preservation of specific terms related to the shoemaker's artisanal techniques over time, and, on the other hand, the integration of more contemporary terms in accordance with the modernization of this artisanal sector. Moreover, this phenomenon is also reflected in the lexicogenesis, as evidenced by the lack of relevance of formal mechanisms commonly observed in other scientific and technical languages, such as syntagmatic composition or word abbreviation. The lexicon predominantly comprises terms with a heritage base, or loanwords deeply embedded within our language and culture, often overlooked by those less familiar with its historical evolution.