Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Current Issue

Abstract

This study aims to deal with the relationship between terminological variation and ideology by examining the system of terminology and the defined individual terms in data protection legislation. With two self-compiled corpora incorporating data protection laws in the United States and the European Union respectively, we adopt a corpus-assisted approach as an effective toolkit to generate a general profile of the system of legal terminology on the one hand and identify the defined legal terms in the two corpora on the other. This study, based on Van Dijk’s (1998) multidisciplinary approach to ideology, seeks to unravel the underlying ideological configurations behind the variation of legal terminology. The findings show that one plausible – though certainly not definitive – interpretation of the variation in legal terminology in the data protection domain lies in the distinct ideological stances imposed by such discourse communities as lawmakers, judges as well as the president and the party in power. The ideological investigation of terminology is a significant aspect of the study of variation phenomena. It is argued that the ideologically variable slants and historical experiences, as the contextual constraints on the ideological beliefs, may contribute to accounting for the spatial and temporal variation of legal terminology.

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational terms related to consumer protection transfer into domestic legal systems of three English-language jurisdictions (the UK, Ireland and Malta) during the transposition of EU directives. Transposition is a process of incorporating EU directives into national law and capturing supranational terms during their entry into national legal systems. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus linguistics and legal analysis of terms, working with a corpus of five directives and their UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts. Distinguishing between a term and a concept level, we propose a categorisation of transfer techniques arranged along a cline from foreignization to domestication. They involve imports, modifications (non-denominative and denominative variants), localisations and zero transfer both at the term level and the concept level.

Abstract

Medical reports provide a record of a patient’s diagnostic or therapeutic process while receiving healthcare. It is, therefore, critical that patients have a good understanding of their medical reports, particularly as various studies show that misunderstanding or failing to understand them can have severe consequences for their health. Today’s medical reports are essentially expository documents in which nominalizations proliferate and where verbs are scarce. This favours the presence of specific medical terminology, which is the main obstacle to comprehension. Based on an analysis of a corpus of medical reports, in this article we, first, identify and study the lexical indicators (including terms of Greek or Latin origin, abbreviations, eponyms, etc.) that hinder understanding of a medical report and, then, correlate these indicators with such textual parameters as cognitive load, semantic opacity, semantic confusion and semantic ambiguity.

Abstract

With the cognitive shift since the 1990s, metaphorical terms have become a recurrent theme in terminological studies. However, how they actually function in science communication has not been fully explored. The issue becomes more pressing today since the exponential expansion of knowledge has heightened our awareness of the need for new designations. And the metaphorical approach is often an economic choice. To gain more insights into the mechanism of metaphorical terms, the authors of the present study will reexamine their functional peculiarities by looking at their linguistic, cognitive and communicative facets respectively. The multidimensional functions of metaphorical terms as exemplified by those in economics are described in detail. More importantly, their dynamic functional potentialities as well as the interplay among them are further discussed.

Abstract

Terminology standardization reflects two different aspects involving the meaning of terms and the structure of terminological resources. In this paper, we focus on the structural aspect of standardization and we present the work of re-modeling TriMED, a multilingual terminological database conceived to support multi-register medical communication. In particular, we provide a general methodology to make the termbase compliant to three of the most recent ISO/TC 37 standards. We focus on the definition of (i) the structural meta-model of the resource, (ii) the provided data categories and its Data Category Repository, and (iii) the TBX format for its implementation. In particular, we provide a general methodology to make the termbase compliant to three of the most recent ISO/TC 37 standards. We focus on the definition of (i) the structural meta-model of the resource, (ii) the provided data categories and its Data Category Repository, and (iii) the TBX format for its implementation.

This article reviews Key Concepts in Chinese Culture (Chinese-English)RMB￥56978-7-5213-1103-7

This article reviews The Routledge handbook of translation and technology978-1-138-23284-6978-1-315-31125-8