AGENCIA EFE, Urgent Spanish Manual, 5th edition, Catedra, Madrid 1989

This manual, one of the oldest and hest known within the Spanish speaking community, tries to take the necessary measures to salve the urgent prohlems of today's journalistic style. Indeed the situation is such we c an not waitfor the Real Academia de la Lengua to publish its new Dictionary. The hook points out linguistic errors, throws light upon doubts, and gives tries to give uniffed c riteria to solve the prohlem of instahility created hy a flood of new terms. A group of philologists of great standing have worked on this edition, as well as an advisory commision.

It should he said from the start that all this goes much Jurther than journalism. Nowadays, the media has greater influence upon the language than the education system itself.

The hook is split up into seven parts:

• Writing: Orthography, morphology, lexic and grammar. - Transcription offoreign alphahets. - Notes on place names. - Regional names which may cause conf usion. Initials and athreviations. - Lexic. Tis is the longest c hapter with more than 1,700 entries. Most of them are suggestions on the substitution of English neologisms, which is very signifiant.

Our aim is not just to comment on this hook but also make it known to Basque translators and writers in general. because heing, as we are bilingual and used to using Spanish, many of the mistakes mentioned here are ours too, and not only in Spanish, hut even worse, when we translate and write in Basque.

Indeed, many of the texts which come to us to he translated are full of errors, therefore this hook can he of great use to the translator in avoiding that these errors he passed on into Basque.

Special emphasis should he made on a problem which cannot be classified along with the aforementioned ones. We refer to the pitiful, affected style which is hecoming more and more in vogue as well as more and more incomprehensible, and by which we are all threatened: eg—'Public opinion changes in accordance with unforseen parameters"—we might add that this is happening not only as far as the State is concerned hut also in the Autonomous Communities and Regions.