In the last fifty years of the 20th century English replaced French as the most widely known and most influential foreign language. In particular, it has influenced Italian lexis in fields such as business and economics, science, technology and more generally in popular culture. However, there has also been an influence of English in terms of syntax, the so called syntactic loans. This paper also discusses how in translation a broader influence of a language over another is encountered as it extends beyond lexical borrowing and syntactic loan: translating goes as far as to create a ‘third code’ having its own standards, though derived from source and target languages. A corpus of articles has been collected to investigate the influence of English on Italian in the field of business and economics.