Week 8 Documentation and terminology

Remember! The terminologist needs complex knowledge of three types:

in terminology = theory, methodology, practical
in the domain = similar to that of a specialist
in the language(s) = similar to that of a linguist

Terminologists must have knowledge of the domain in order to:

adopt a subject-field classification system (ex. biology, chemistry etc.)
select those documents that are most representative of the domain
isolate and extract terms
make the distinction between a primary subject field and a field of application (ex. chlorine=a
specific chemical compound is related to chemistry; it is also used in dry-cleaning)

Steps in Terminology management:

1. Corpus compilation
2. Term identification
3. Information extraction
4. Analysis (concept and term analysis) and synthesis (structure in Term records)
5. Encoding
6. Organisation
7. Management (adding, eliminating, altering)

Researching
Terminological research – consists of the following steps:
- Research of concept and term description in the source language in the relevant sources
- Documentation of the (re)search result: target term, definition, sources, context, grammatical
information etc.
- Research of target language terms and description and contrastive analysis

Documentation is the source of terminographical work.

The first step in creating a terminology record is the research stage. This consists of:
 Establishing concept diagrams
 Structuring the field of research
 Scanning for terms
 Establishing a monolingual base list
 Performing conceptual analysis
 Creating a terminology case file
 Matching concepts and their designations across languages

STAGES OF DOCUMENTATION
- Terminological work – to begin with selection and analysis of the specialized documentation
- Works supplying this information: specialized works, lexicographic collections, encyclopedias or
atlases
- Term units are selected and confronted (other collections)
- Other forms may be rejected = they belong to different subject areas
- Term info = compiled in term records
- Term records = gathered in larger documents glossaries, etc.
- For each term, a series of linguistic and pragmatic data
DOCUMENTATION, SOURCES, DOMAIN
Other steps:
- Finding solutions for problem term or for term creation – TM – more and more a collaborative
process
- Storing data (glossaries, databases, translation memories = create and maintain, etc.)
- Disseminating results = feedback from users

preparation stage: necessary source of information to acquire the cognitive competence

!!!important – sources must always be presented as a citation from written documentation or as a

quotation of a specialist's statement.

Terms appear in specialized communication when specialists have to name a concept of their discipline.
Terminologists retrieve from the documents the units they will integrate in dictionaries to be consulted by
specialists and other users

Knowledge can be extracted from both written and oral specialized sources. The written sources may
include:
- documents and publications related to the subject field under study, existing databases and files,
dictionaries, terminological works, and bibliographies
- Internet sites and portals accessed through search engines for isolated term queries (e.g. WebCorp) or
for thematic queries (e.g. meta search engines)
- Books in print or electronic format, directories and computerized bibliographies provided by
documentalists
- documentation recommended by subject-field specialists
- information provided in newspapers and specialized periodicals about recent developments in a given
subject field
- conference proceedings
- legal documents and regulations
- departmental publications and glossaries
- corporate handbooks and brochures
- advertising material
oral sources:
- oral communications in events
- personal communications
media sources:
- audio
- video
- multimedia
Preferably, this list will be computerized, and the titles will be coded so that they can be used during
data entry, on terminology records or in case files. (fig. 1, 2, 3)

Oral info – corroborated or confirmed through further research.

Written info – used to prepare a directory or inventory of written sources; usually not necessary to obtain
permission to cite individual paragraphs or a limited number of excerpts from a given author or from in-
house documentation.

Documentation sources:
- encyclopaedias
- monographs and technical and academic manuals
- dictionaries, vocabularies, and documentary, terminology and linguistic databases
- proceedings of congresses and symposia
- specialized and popularised periodicals
 - brochures and publicity flyers
- internet sites of the best content providers in the area of specialization

The documents may be:

- specialised or educational
- official or informal
- comprehensive, such as monographs
- topic-centred, such as an article in a periodical, or encyclopaedia, a promotional brochure

As a general rule, documents to be used in terminology research are selected based on the following criteria:
- relevance of the terminology and number of defining elements in textual supports
- adequacy to purpose
- organization
- reputation of the author, the series or the editor in the targeted milieu
- presence of glossaries and indexes of concepts and official titles appearing in the document
- timeliness of the contents
- completeness of the contents relative to the evolution of specialised knowledge in the subject field in
question
- linguistic quality of the documentation

Sources must be evaluated, selected and used according to certain criteria.

- the publication date
- the author's credentials
- the structure of the contents
- the presence of an up-to-date bibliography
- the presence of an index of concepts dealt with
- the presence of a glossary that defines the concepts
- the presence of a table of contents
TASK 1 Which of the sources below would most likely contain the best English neologisms in the
terminology of electronic commerce?
Sources List
Source A
Specialized periodicals (Electronic Commerce Research, International Journal of Electronic Business) -
issues since January 2009
Source B
Encyclopedias (Encyclopedia of Gardening) - published between 2007-2017
Source C
Popular magazines such as Economist (U.K.), Fortune (U.S.) - issues published in 2016
Source D
Internet sites on e-commerce (2010-2018)
Resources:
Translation dictionaries
Monolingual - Free dictionary http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php
Bi-lingual - Hallo.ro
Specialised dictionaries
terminologie comunitară EuroVoc at http://eurovoc.europa.eu/drupal/
dictionar juridic online http://www.dictionar-online.ro/juridic.htm
Explanatory dictionaries:
Cambridge http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Merriam Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/
The Freedictionary https://www.thefreedictionary.com/
Thesauri:
Thesaurus.com https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/turn
Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/
Roget’s Thesaurus http://www.roget.org/
Encyclopedias
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Britannica http://www.britannica.com/
Citizendium http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium
Glossaries http://ier.gov.ro/
Databases IATE https://iate.europa.eu/home
Corpora: translation corpus https://www.linguee.com/
Balanced corpus English (British) BNC https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/
Corpus de referinta pt limba romana COROLA http://corola.racai.ro/
Translation forums
proZcom http://www.proz.com/ https://www.proz.com/search/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sptranslators/

Other sources at http://linguistech.ca/Online+Tools+-+home#terminology_databases

Example of documentation record

EuroTermBank Deliverable 2.1 - Identification of existing terminology resources la
http://project.eurotermbank.com/uploads/D2.1%20Identification%20of%20existing%20terminology
%20resources.pdf
This project subdivided information in A) Administrative data and B) Content related data and asessed
source based on the following crietria:
- name of the resource
- name of the author
- copyright holder
- availability
- description of the resource
- data medium
- arrangement of terms
- approach
- languages of the terminology collection
- subject field(s)
- number of concepts/terms/entries.

FUN FACT! :-/

The costs for preparing terminological data may vary from USD 10 (by a non-expert terminographer in a
well-documented and comparatively less dynamic subject field) per entry in a given language to x1000 USD
(by highly authoritative expert groups) per entry – if all costs are calculated (incl. travel expenses for
meetings etc.). However, the costs for the preparation of terminologies are more often than not disconnected
from the price asked for providing the data (in book form, as a database etc.). Mostly the ‚price‘ of
terminological data is far below their ‚creation costs‘.