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

Abstract

This article examines the status of constructed controlled terminologies from the perspective of the coverage of terms/concepts. To facilitate controlled authoring of Japanese texts of the municipal domain and promote machine translatability into English, we constructed terminologies in the following way: (1) Japanese-English term pairs are extracted from aligned texts; (2) term variations are controlled by defining preferred and proscribed terms for both languages. To assess the coverage of the constructed terminologies, we propose a quantitative extrapolation method that estimates the potential vocabulary size. The coverage estimations show that the coverage of terms for Japanese is higher than that for English by about 10%, which reflects the greater diversity of the translated English terms. The coverage of concepts reaches around 60% for both Japanese and English. The method also enables us to quantitatively estimate how much effort is needed to further increase the coverage.

Abstract

Apart from the importance of accurate meaning transference, the key to English translation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) terms lies in the proper translation of term forms, in particular, of long term structures and length. This article reports on an empirical study of the English translation of long TCM terms by the following procedures: (1) collecting 1220 TCM terms and their English translations from dictionaries, journals and official websites related to TCM terminology translation; (2) segmenting and POS-tagging with ICTCLAS to obtain 823 long TCM terms with 3 or more Chinese words; (3) selecting 150 out of the 823 long TCM terms through random sampling; (4) POS-tagging the 150 English translations with CLAWS5; (5) basing on the parallel corpus and systematically discussing the structures, term length change, translation techniques and translation regularities generalized from the English translation of long TCM terms. The result shows nominalization, shift of some pre-modifiers into post-modifiers, and amplification of a predicate in the 9 kinds of structural features, and some translation techniques like literal translation, paraphrase, adaptation, amplification and simplification employed in the English translation of long TCM terms.

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based study of certain key nouns used in promotional texts describing cheese in English. A corpus of online cheese descriptions was compiled to extract lexical information regarding the characterization of cheese. All in all, 37 key nouns were identified and classified into 7 semantic categories: appearance, part, colour, aroma, texture, taste and quality ranking. All the occurrences of each key noun were analysed to obtain an exhaustive inventory of the phraseological patterns in which they occur. The results show both objective characteristics (size, shape and colour) and subjective features which tend to be described positively in this promotional subgenre (aroma, texture and taste). Additionally, this text type includes key nouns related to the quality ranking of the cheeses promoted. The main aim of this paper is to gain insight into one particular subgenre – promotional cheese descriptions – through the major lexical co-occurrences used to convey positive evaluation of cheeses.

Abstract

Despite going through some ups and downs, grammar teaching has always been one of the central issues in the history of second language teaching. In order to teach grammar, teachers frequently get involved in metalanguage, which has grammatical terminology as one of its major components. Since the nature and use of grammatical terminology in language teaching has remained a considerably under-researched area to the day, the present study, originally a doctoral dissertation, was an attempt to find a difficulty index for a more or less comprehensive list of English grammatical terms, collected from various sources of English grammar. For this purpose, frequency of terms in a researcher-built corpus of EFL/ESL pedagogic grammar textbooks and English students’ familiarity with the terms were used as the two main criteria for calculating the difficulty index. A corpus of 14 grammatical textbooks was created, and then each of the 459 terms in the list was searched for in the textbooks to calculate their frequencies as well as ranks in the corpus. Student familiarity with the terms in the list was also measured through a productive test of grammatical terminology administered to 72 BA students of English at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. Based on the results, the traditional dichotomy of scientific versus pedagogic terminology was questioned, arguing for an additional category, non-pedagogic term. Accordingly, 173 (37.7%) of the terms in the list never appeared in the corpus and thus were labelled non-pedagogic. Terms with a large corpus/test rank were reanalyzed to find out about the reasons for the gap. Furthermore, the distribution of terms across the corpus textbooks revealed that as the level of the books rises, the number of terms also increases, indicating the direct relationship between second language proficiency and metalingual knowledge. Most importantly, more than 10 major and minor trends in the use of grammatical terminology in pedagogy were explored and suggested. Finally, as the output of the study, 6 equivalent objective tests of pedagogic grammatical terminology were developed for the first time in the literature.

Abstract

In recent decades, the scope of terminology research has been extended. The peculiarities and complexities of terminology are further ascertained by the exploration into the practice of terminology translation in the field of humanities and social sciences. The cultural functions that terminology in this research field (H&SS terms) fulfill and the intrinsic difficulties involved in translating them are worth further investigation. This paper based on some reflections of the development of the NUTermBank discusses the legitimacy of terminology translation as independent research and makes an initial attempt to theorize about how the research can be actually carried out. A holistic view of terminology translation is taken and a 3-M research model is proposed in this paper.

This article reviews Semantic Data Mining, An Ontology-Based Approach978-1-61499-745-0978-1-61499-746-7

This article reviews The Future of Translation Technology – Towards a world without Babel978-1-138-84204-5

This article reviews Neologica. Revue internationale de néologie, n^o 11 — La néologie en terminologie978-2-406-06994-2