KAM, CEO, HRM: "who is who" on the job market? : a contrastive analysis of foreign job titles in Italian and Polish

Abstract

Whenever browsing job advertisements in Polish and Italian, it is impossible not to notice an influx of English job titles. International companies which use English as their corporate language are also likely to choose it for the job titles and job descriptions in all the countries of their operations. Consequently, more and more often foreign job titles, like for example, manager, supervisor, leader, specialist, etc. – to name just a few, are adopted into the systems of various languages, including Polish and Italian. Sometimes names of occupations are translated into the native language word by word or native equivalents are adopted to avoid the usage of the foreign job title. It seems that the adaptation of foreign names of occupations is a vast area of research which requires further linguistics and extra-linguistic investigation. The aim of the article is to compare foreign job names in Italian and Polish. In order to analyze the behavior of foreign job titles and to compare their usage, a corpus consisting of names of occupations was compiled. Job titles were collected from advertisements posted online by major newspapers and recruitment agencies in Italy (http://lavoro.corriere.it/), and Poland (http://gazetapraca.pl/, http://pracuj.pl/) from the period of one month in 2014. The gathered data was then compared quantitatively and qualitatively to draw conclusions concerning the use of foreign job titles instead of the native ones and the possible reasons for the preference of English job titles.