We seem to have said it all between us in reviews of various other titles in the new Routledge dictionary series, both in printed volumes and CD‐ROM programmes. They really are all winners and have quickly taken the series to a prestige which no library with any pretensions to language assistance can afford to ignore. In some respects this title is even more significant than the others: business and commerce lie at the heart of international affairs, and Spanish and English are two of the world’s most widely spoken languages.
The contents offer more than 100,000 terms and references with 4,000 abbreviations across the whole range of specialist and general terminologies. Supplements include examples of business correspondence in both languages; job titles used in the UK, USA, Spain and Latin America; stock exchanges; financial and economic indexes; and a brief ready reference section for the countries of the world. The strengths of this series have already been enumerated elsewhere in Reference Reviews and are again evident here: the range, accuracy and completeness of up‐to‐date vocabulary must come first, but that is supported by its thorough treatment including UK/USA and Spanish/Latin American usage. All is presented clearly on the printed page.
We have been looking in our reviews of this series at both printed and CD‐ROM products. There is clearly room for both on the market, depending on the circumstances of the purchaser. For most reference library collections the printed books will be the preferred option as most enquiries are for discrete terms and library users are not (yet) coming in through word processing packages. A set of these Routledge dictionaries on your shelves will satisfy the greatest proportion of language enquiries likely to come to almost any library. For general reference, larger reference or specifically business collections this is another title we can recommend unreservedly.
