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The SIL Fieldworks Language Explorer program allows you to specify multiple phonological environments for different allomorphs of a lexical item. Each environment is given a title and a description.

One of the environments I am specifying for the program is the word final environment:

/_#

The particular Lexicon I'm documenting is for Spanish speakers, and I need the Spanish title of that phonological environment. I have, of course, looked up the Google translation -- "palabra final", but I know enough about translation that this may not even be sensible in Spanish.

A brief description in Spanish would be useful as well -- along the lines of "occurring at the end of a word" / "ocurriendo al final de una palabra"

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  • Anticipating a VTC reaction, this is a request for linguistic terminology, not a request for translation. To the extent that any question about terminology is on-topic, this is an example of an on-topic question.
    – user6726
    Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 19:14
  • es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espa%C3%B1ol_de_Am%C3%A9rica uses the phrase "en la posición final de la palabra". Does that help? Apparently they eschew creation of terms, in favour of describing it.
    – prash ♦
    Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 20:32
  • In Portuguese I think I'd just say "in final [medial, initial] position" if context makes it clear, otherwise "at the end [middle, start] of words".
    – melissa_boiko
    Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 21:01
  • I can just confirm that "palabra final" is definitely not it. It's a word-for-word translation that changes the concept and translates to "final word". That's the risk when using automatic translators to translate isolated short expressions. I also expect that the most appropriate translation will be an expression a little longer than the English one, like "al final de [la] palabra", but I'm not a native or even speaker so take that with a grain of salt. I can say the former thing with some confidence because I am at least a native Romance speaker.
    – LjL
    Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 21:59
  • 1
    This question poorly introduces the concept it asks for.
    – 25254
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 5:35

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Based purely on attestation on the web in materials written by Spanish speaking linguists, I conclude that the standard expression is "a final de palabra". Hualde uses that expression in various writings. Possible but less popular is "posición final de la palabra". Wildly popular is "fin de la palabra", but many of the hits don't have anything to do with the linguistic expression. This is not very different from the variation you find in linguistic works in English between "word-finally", "in final position", "finally" and "in word-final position": as terminology, all are possible and only "finally" is eschewed (as too ambiguous).

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