TERMINOLOGY

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TERMINOLOGY Development of science/technology
many subject areas wider and narrower aspects of
different field of study (new concepts, new
labels, or terms) LSPs languages for special
purposes Appositely labelled terms, bound
together by appropriate words from the general
vocabulary stock Terminology is the study of and
the field of activity concerned with the
collection, description, processing and
presentation of terms, i.e. lexical items
belonging to specialised areas of usage of one or
more languages (Sager 19902) A lexical item
representing the term could also exist in the
general language e.g. windowin a room / on a pc
monitor A lexical item representing the term
could also represent another term e.g.
enlargement ingrossamento (med), ingrandimento
(phot) In theory, terms should have no synonyms
monosemic Modern subject field glossaries and
dictionaries display generic and partitive
relations between terms (p. 35 Taylor)
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TERMS AND TRANSLATORS In taxonomic sciences and
in other sciences, it is possible that conceptual
fields coincide or show a great similarity, so
that we do find many linguistic borrowings. Terms
are TRANSLATED, CALQUED, BORROWED the translator
must have a deep knowledge of the field, in order
to make appropriate choices not only
dictionaries, glossaries etc. but supplementary
information . There are always new terms being
formed on the model of existing terms derived
from Latin/Greek by affixation, compounding, or
abbreviating (clipping, truncation, blending
etc) PARALLEL PATTERNS same macro-processes of
term formation across languages
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What is different across languages is term
formation processes at a micro-level e.g.
compound pressure screw sostantivo composto
vite a pressione MACRO-FUNCTION purpose to
classify the type of screw is identical in the
two languages the term is not composed of just
one lexical word MICRO-FUNCTION if we analyse
it internally, a two-noun cluster in English
translates as nounprepositionnoun in Italian A
typical feature of the English language is the
creation of long noun strings, usually with a
strong premodification (adj/participles)
qualifying or classifying nouns, while in
Italian, whe have to unroll them by adding
prepositions and adjectives e.g. single-side
finishing method finitura di un fianco per
volta Sometimes, in Italian, we have just one
term instead of a string of words e.g.
bag-filling machine insacchettatrice
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At a macro-level in written language, we can
observe a greater lexical density, rather than in
spoken language prevalence of content words
(lexical words) rather than function words At a
macro-level in technical texts, we can observe a
greater term density, rather than
content/function words density high number of
terms hard for the translator (expertise
needed) trying to create same effect on target
language audience e.g. abstracts for medical
articles densely-presented mass of unknown,
unshared information Lexical density can be
considered a parameter for register and technical
expression in translation corpus-based devices
can underline more/less term-dense parts of a
technical text
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• Terminologists have designed dictionaries,
  glossaries, and sophisticated monolingual and
  bilingual data banks in order to help specialist
  translators
• WE SHOULD USE both BILINGUAL and MONOLINGUAL
  dictionaries the 1st to identify the right
  semantic area, the 2nd to apply it to context,
  proverbs, idioms, tropes, colloquial expressions
  etc.
• Bilingual dictionaries provide information on
• - morphology (plurals, past, structure etc.)
• pronunciation and spelling
• different meanings/uses according to derivation
  or compounding (e.g. affixes, vocabulary
  blocks/clusters)
• homonymy (separate headwords), polysemy (1., 2.,
  etc.), homography (permit (n), permit (v))
• options to fit different context-bound solutions
  (politics/policy, economics/economy)
• Sample sentences MARKERS (tech., fam., irony
  etc.)

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CORPORA Corpus-based studies are studies based on
a large body of recorded text material
(written/spoken), stored on computer (text
fragments/ whole texts/ samples etc.) not only
mechanised dictionaries they are manipulable
e.g. I can ask for a terms frequency of use or
collocational range any word/term can be
consulted in thousands different contexts
exhaustive information about the behaviour of a
lexical item in relation to its co-text
collocates statistical possibilities Data from
corpora have helped rethinking some basic
concepts, such as the autonomous nature of adj
rather, the words are co-selected by the speaker
their senses overlap/blend into a single unit
e.g. We say dry land - meaning land not
submerged or under water land as opposed to
sea(terra ferma) - and not steady land,
although it would make sense the adj dry is
co-selected with the noun, rather than selected
from a paradigm of possible descriptions of land.