Most of the agreements included in the FTA corpus (the only exception being the FTAA) have been officially signed and ratified by several national and supranational organizations, countries and multilateral bodies in the last two decades. Specifically, these entities are the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the European Union
(EU), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Canada, the United States of America, Mexico, the Caribbean Community, the Dominican Re-public, Colombia, Peru and Chile. Therefore, the corpus includes texts from different language variants, as it comprises texts written in English from the United States and Canada, European Union texts, as well as Spanish from many Latin American countries and blocs of countries. The FTAA agreement has not yet been ratified, thus, it remains as a draft version since November 2003 and the parties have completely stopped discussing the negotation due to political differences (Schott, 2005).
These FTA texts were drafted in English and Spanish by the negotiating teams of the parties involved. Since the FTAs in principle have equal legal status, they are not considered as translations of each other. However, they were produced in different forms: some of the agreements were written in English and then translated into Spanish or vice versa. In other cases, as the negotiation advanced, normally using English as a lingua franca, the teams of free trade experts wrote a bilingual draft (ˇSarcevic, 2000), with each team writing in its mother tongue. Alexander (1999, 1470) claims that “English is optional or necessary for international business transactions, among non-native speakers.”
Whether it is Norwegian salmon, Colombian coffee, Peruvian avocado, Chilean wine or any other product, the trade of these goods among nations is regulated by a trade agreement. Trade is a very important human activity that has emerged since the beginning of civilization. It has promoted not only economic exchange, but also cultural and political integration among nations. Nowadays, in an allegedly globalized world, trade continues to be an activity of great relevance for economic development and several supra-national organizations have developed a framework to regulate intersupra-national trade.
The growth of world merchandise exports has been exponential over the last decades, as illustrated in Figure 3.1. In 1948, as the world was recover-ing from the Second World War, merchandise exports amounted to USD 59 billion. Twenty five years later, it had increased to USD 579 billion. Then, in 2010, according to WTO data, world merchandise exports amounted to USD 14,851 billion, and the European Continent alone had a share of 37.9%.
Figure 3.1: World merchandise exports in billions of USD from 1948 to 2014 according to WTO data
In 2014, exports peaked USD 18,494 billion worldwide, with Europe as the stronger party, and within Europe, Germany, Netherlands, France and Italy were the main players involved in export activities. Thus, as of 2014, the main exporting region is Europe with 36.8% of the total share, followed closely by Asia with 32% whereas North America, which comprises the USA, Mexico and Canada, comes third with 13.5% of the share of exports.19
Worldwide trade policies are regulated mainly by three supranational economic organizations, namely, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO. By far, the WTO is the youngest of the three (Narlikar, 2005). These supranational entities are described more specifically in Section 3.3.
FTAs were preceded by other trade regulation systems. Shortly after the Second World War, there was an initiative to promote free trade globally as a strategy to foster economic development. This initiative was the
Interna-19 For detailed data, see https://www.wto.org/english/res e/statis e/
its2015 e/its15 world trade dev e.htm
tional Trade Organization (ITO). However, the ITO never entered into force.
Then, in 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was es-tablished. This agreement set the norms and regulations for the growth of trade among nations in the postwar period. The GATT lasted almost 48 years until it was absorbed into the WTO.
Some definitions related to trade seem relevant at this point. Free trade refers to the “absence of government policies designed to regulate interna-tional trade, especially import limitations such as tariff or quotas” (Moon, 2000a, 574). A free trade area is defined as “a regional bloc made up of two or more countries which agree to liberalize their bilateral trade, while maintaining their restrictions on trade within third countries” (Nicolaides, 2000, 575). Last, a trade agreement is defined by Moon (2000b, 1570) as
any initiative involving the cooperation of two or more governments to facilitate or regulate trade between their economies. It can take several forms: bilateral, minilateral (or regional) and multilateral (or global)”.
The corpus data for this research includes all these types of agreements.
The nature of FTA texts is appropriate for the presence of interdisci-plinary terminology from the fields of law (e.g. customs legislation, procuring entity), economics (e.g. unilateral tariff reduction, preferential tariff treat-ment), subdomains involved in the goods subject to trade (e.g. freight bro-kerage services,on-line data processing and information) or specific products (e.g. fine animal hair, textured polyester filaments).
According to Gamero (2001), prestigious international entities such as UNESCO, offer validated criteria to classify specialized texts such as the different scientific and technical fields. Therefore, from an onomasiological perspective, the texts containing FTAs can be delimited conceptually by using the UNESCO nomenclature.20 Under heading 53, this nomenclature lists Economic Sciences: 5307: Economic theory, 5307.12 International Trade theory, 5310 International economics: 5310.04 International business, 5310.07 International investment and, perhaps the most relevant for FTAs, 5310.09 International trade relations.
20http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0008/000829/082946eb.pdf