Can you master the biz world in Hebrew?

If you had problems with your Hebrew, at least you could talk to your "broker" about your "dividends."

By SHARON WROBEL
dictionary biz 88 (photo credit: )
dictionary biz 88
(photo credit: )
Maybe you've had some problems with your Hebrew, but at least you could talk to your "broker" about your "dividends," right? Well, even that's about to get a bit trickier. "For the past 12 years, we have been meeting monthly with academics and professionals from the banking industry and the capital markets to provide Hebrew translations or equivalents to financial terms in English, which have been continuing to enter the Israeli market, in particular over the last few years," said Gidon Lahav, chairman of the committee on banking and capital market terms at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. But they aren't planning to leave you in the lurch. The committee, which was was initiated by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 1993 at the request of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, on Monday launched publication of the new "Banking and Capital Market Dictionary" in cooperation with the TASE. "As the Israeli capital market and banking industry has been opening up to global markets, we saw the need to provide the linguistically correct terms in Hebrew rather than to just to copy the English," said Lahav. So, if you ever wondered what a teller, an obligo, monetary drain, on-call, a blue-chip share or a currency swap really are in Hebrew, you can now find the linguistically correct answer instead of trying to Hebraicize the English. "The target of the dictionary was to determine and differentiate the terms, for which the equivalent in Hebrew is found and those, which are adopted from the English," said Lahav. For example, under the new rules, you can still call an "option" an "option" and a "dividend" a "dividend" as they have been adopted into the Hebrew standard language. The term "broker," however, often heard in Hebrew usage, was not adopted into the standard and has been replaced by the Hebrew term "amil boursa." Other terms you might want to familiarize yourself with are "minayat idit" for "blue-chip stocks," "kaspar" for "teller" and "tashkif" for "prospectus."