First published in 2002. The German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance is the second dictionary to be published in Routledge’s programme of bilingual business dictionaries. The series was launched in December 1995 with the French Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance. It would not have been possible to compile this dictionary within a relatively short timescale, and to the standard achieved, without the use of a highly sophisticated, custom-designed database. The database’s most significant feature is that it is designed as a relational database: term records for each language are held in separate files, with further files consisting only of link records. Links between terms in different language files represent translations, enabling us to handle various types of one-to-many and many-to-one equivalences. Links between terms within a single language file represent crossreferences between geographical variants and abbreviations. The content of the database for this dictionary was created in three principal phases. A considerable proportion of the English term list was already available following the publication of the French Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance. The term list was then sent out to specialist translators - with current practical experience of business translation - who supplied German equivalences and expanded the English and German term lists to include the main relevant terminology in their particular spheres of work.