Abstract
Translation plays a key role in Language for Specific Purposes, especially in the field of Information Technology (IT). User guides for software and hardware products are usually written in English, and then released as translated texts in many languages. This often leads to the introduction of anglicisms, and different features resulting reveal different national attitudes towards borrowings. In this paper frequency and treatment of anglicisms are analysed in a cross-linguistic perspective, by comparing data in French, German, Russian and Spanish. The analysis is based on the observation of two multilingual corpora: a translation corpus of IT user guides on the one hand, and a comparable corpus of forum-discussions about IT on the other. The paper first discusses whether any realtionship exists between translators' and non-specialists' use of loanwords in each corpus, and then the correlations between such use of anglicisms and different language policies.