Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2017

This study was performed to investigate the influence of the English language on the medical/dental terminology of Croatian dental students. It emerged from the terminological projects of the School of Dental Medicine, University of Zagreb that had been conducted as a part of the national programme the Development of Croatian Special Field Terminology. Students were asked to translate English sentences allegedly extracted from dental literature into Croatian. The results showed that most students translated the offered English terms using anglicisms rather than choosing Croatian terms. The finding that students distinctively prefer professional literature in Croatian suggests that their professional vocabulary is mostly modelled by the Croatian educational materials and by the discourse of instruction. These results suggest the need for further activities concerning the popularization of Croatian medical/dental terminology for the purpose of preservation and development of a native professional vocabulary and of improving communication with patients and patients’ understanding of medical information.

This paper presents a methodology for the automatic extraction of specialized Arabic, English and French verbs of the field of computing. Since nominal terms are predominant in terminology, our interest is to explore to what extent verbs can also be part of a terminological analysis. Hence, our objective is to verify how an existing extraction tool will perform when it comes to specialized verbs in a given specialized domain. Furthermore, we want to investigate any particularities that a language can represent regarding verbal terms from the automatic extraction perspective. Our choice to operate on three different languages reflects our desire to see whether the chosen tool can perform better on one language compared to the others. Moreover, given that Arabic is a morphologically rich and complex language, we consider investigating the results yielded by the extraction tool. The extractor used for our experiment is TermoStat ( Drouin 2003 ). So far, our results show that the extraction of verbs of computing represents certain differences in terms of quality and particularities of these units in this specialized domain between the languages under question.

Although the level of awareness of HIV has significantly improved over the past decade following the coordinated activities of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Nigeria still remains one of the most burdened countries in the world with about 3 million people living with HIV. Increasing enlightenment campaigns on HIV and AIDS have not been able to achieve remarkable behaviour change as a result of the non-use of appropriate nomenclatures. Given the low literacy rate of Nigerians in English (about 61% based on UNESCO Institute for Statistics), communication strategies can only be effective when indigenous Nigerian languages have standardised and appropriate nomenclatures for HIV and AIDS. This study argues that the use of appropriate terms in the local languages in referring to HIV and AIDS is capable of reducing the stigmatisation and discrimination of people living with HIV and AIDS, and consequently reduce the spread of HIV through behaviour change. Accordingly, the study embarks on the lexical modernisation of HIV and AIDS nomenclatures in Nigeria’s three major languages (i.e. Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) in line with current developments around the world in the management of the two health conditions.