Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2002

In this article we describe a theoretical and practical approach to the analysis of phraseological units, specifically terminological phrasemes (Meyer and Mackintosh 1994, 1996), as entities determined by predicate relations, leaving aside, therefore, the traditional view of collocations and compounds as static structures following specific syntactic patterns. Instead, we claim that these units can be considered as terminographic formalizations of a conceptual structure, a phraseme template, established according to certain ontological patterns. This phraseological analysis accounts for phenomena such as multidimensionality, recursiveness and inheritance, which pose a problem in the management of multiword units. We are currently implementing this methodology in OntoTerm®, a concept-oriented tool for terminology management used in a research project called OncoTerm, whose scope of study has been, so far, the subdomain of oncology.

Today, Vietnamese physicians are directing their attention towards works on semantic relations in medical writing in Vietnamese by trying to build terminological databases using phrasal terms. Phrasal term patterns from the common language are examples of motivated form term formation and comply with terminology policy guidelines in Vietnam. The object of this paper is to examine the typology of various constructions of phrasal terms in recent Vietnamese medical terminology, to describe how medical phrasal terms can be produced by their users in Vietnamese medical literature and to show the role of phrasal term patterns in the democratisation of knowledge.

The work discussed in this paper is situated in the framework proposed by Cabré (1998a, 1998b, 1999, among others), i.e., the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT) which intends to explain terms “as singular units and, at the same time, similar to other communication units, within a global scheme of representation of reality.” The general purpose of this paper is to give empirical evidence of the thesis proposed by Cabré (1998, 1999, etc.), Temmerman (1997), Condamines and Rebeyrolle (1997) who discuss the univocality and monosemy of terminological units. In addition, the purpose is to show that even in texts aiming a high degree of precision, with an established and conventional form, such as legal texts (van Dijk, 1978), terminological units may show a conceptual variation. In this paper, I will specifically analyze the behavior of two terms: distinction and discrimination in a set of legal texts.

Since concepts are the starting point of all terminological work, it follows that the development of a terminological base should place the main emphasis on the development of a conceptual system. The major objective of the PROMETHEUS project was the development of a generic ontological framework for the design of conceptual systems that would support searching, exploring and navigating multilingual terminological bases, at least for the European languages. Such a framework must provide the necessary semantic distinctions for structuring conceptual systems in specific domains in order to solve semantic problems inherent in linguistic ontologies and to provide a common ontological backbone for sharing and exploiting multilingual terminologies. The paper compares and reports on two well-established ontological frameworks for the development of multilingual resources for the European languages: EuroWordNet (EWN) and SIMPLE top ontologies. It investigates the correspondences between these frameworks, their underlying principles and their suitability to serve as organizational backbones in terminological knowledge bases. Finally, the paper concludes with a description of the implemenetation of the framework, which is based on the organizational principles underlying these multilingual resources.

This article contains an investigation into the terminology profession in Canada in the 21st century. Terminologists themselves have their own opinion about the state of the profession, but the aim of this study is to investigate terminology from the perspective of those who employ terminologists by analyzing a corpus of job advertisements for a variety of terminology- and translation-related positions that were collected between January 2000 and June 2002. Spurred on by the effects of globalization, the language industry, including terminology, is in a period of change. Based on empirical evidence collected from the corpus, this article attempts to evaluate the current state of the profession in Canada and to determine what employers are looking for.