History and translation of the basic insurance lexicon in English, Serbian and other languages

In this paper, we shall examine some of the basic lexemes in the English language that refer to insurance and compare them to the equivalent lexicon in Serbian and some other European languages, using historical etymological analysis and a discussion of translational semantics of the relevant terminology in order to eventually provide some guidance for practical translational problems. Insurance in the modern sense of the word largely took shape in England toward the end of and after the Middle Ages; hence, it is understandable that, due to the emergence of a completely new conceptual foundation, a major influence on the international lexicon referring to the field of insurance came from that country. In many other European countries, that lexicon has been partially adopted from English and partially locally amended. In Serbia, there has been a delayed historical development of insurance as a socio-economic phenomenon, in part due to the acquisition of independence as late as 1878. As is the case with many other terminological fields in English, when it comes to the word "insurance" itself and its most closely related lexemes, we come across Latin linguistic roots, which entered English via Old French. However, matters are further complicated by the existence of other terms which can be translated into other languages with the appropriate equivalents of "insurance": the historical "assurance" and, especially, the still often used and somewhat semantically complicated "underwrite". G. Davis showed that, as late as the middle of the twentieth century, there were still great terminological ambiguities in the Anglophone register that could be extremely confusing in everyday practice. In this work, Davis even advocated solving this issue by establishing an industrial committee of sorts for the standardization of terminology in insurance. Specifically, the notion of underwriting has proven itself to be a common cause of confusion. The objective of the initial comparative historical analysis applied in this paper is to address the question of the origin and development of English and international basic terminology in insurance, while the second, practical half of the paper applies translational semantics and aims to suggest the direction of solving translational dilemmas and other problems related to the lexicon of insurance, such as standardization. With growing market demands, closely tied to other social and technological changes, modern organizations are put in a position where they need to follow business trends in order to meet the needs and desires of customers, which entails that internal terminological confusion within the industry ought to be systematically resolved.