This paper aims to reveal the rhetorical structure and the linguistic features of persuasive language in online advertisements of electronic products. Nowadays, the bulk of e-commerce is carried out in English, and it is often the case that non-native speakers are required to write different text types for various professional purposes, including promotional texts. This need has prompted the present study and the results have been used to build software to help native speakers of Spanish when writing promotional texts in English. The analysis reveals that these texts typically have two main rhetorical moves: one for identifying the product and another one for describing it. The latter move is further divided into two steps: one including objective features (size, weight, etc.) and the other focusing on persuading the potential customer. This is mainly achieved with the use of a relatively informal style (imperatives, contractions, clipping, subject/auxiliary omissions, etc.) and lexico-grammatical elements conveying positive evaluation (multiple modification, multal quantifying expressions, etc.). The findings show that online advertisements of electronic products may be regarded as a specific subgenre with particular macro-and microlinguistic characteristics, which have been identified in this paper for technical writing assistance.

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Project) developed at the University of León (Spain) for identifying instances of low-quality rendering of grammatical features when translating from English into Spanish using translation universals. The analysis provides information about: i) the resources available (or absence thereof) in each of the languages to express a given meaning and their relative centrality; ii) the solutions favored by translators to bridge the cross-linguistic disparities and/or gaps; iii) the erroneous or non-existent uses and structures transferred from the source language into the target language. These results can be systematized in terms of simplification, interference, or unique grammatical features. Additional areas that can benefit from this type of research are translation practice, translator training and foreign language teaching (FLT).Assessing translation quality is generally seen as a difficult task because of the inadequacy of the tools available. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of a corpus-based contrastive methodology (ACTRES

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This paper explores the translations of the English discourse particle oh into Spanish. Discourse particles are particularly problematic in translation because of their multi-functionality, their high degree of grammaticalization, and their strong culturebound character. The interjection oh is one frequent discourse marker in English spoken discourse, conveying text-organising and interpersonal functions. This study will focus on the translations of oh in the 2.5 million-word English-Spanish parallel corpus PACTRES. The aim is to provide an inventory of translation solutions in Spanish for the various functions of oh in English texts.