On Hungarian Coroneologisms and their Italian Translation

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health crisis that has radically changed us and the world and has a profound impact on every area of life. Its impact goes far beyond the health sector, affecting all aspects of society and our lives, including our vocabulary. Since its outbreak, it has led to the explosion of hundreds and hundreds of newly coined words, terminologies, and phrases in the world’s different languages and these neologisms play a significant role throughout the course of the pandemic. The objective of this paper is to analyze the Hungarian neologisms emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic, to identify the main tendencies in their formation, and to investigate – among Italian university students in the Hungarian language – the understanding processes of the Hungarian coroneologisms coined during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to describe the relating difficulties (if any) as well as to illustrate the possible strategies adopted in the translation from Hungarian into Italian. The coroneologisms included in the experiment are retrieved from the trilingual domain-specific Hungarian/Italian/English dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic created with Lexonomy, and they are also analyzed from the word-formation point of view.