ARCHIVED 1.1.3. Basic Concepts and Best Practices

 

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Terminology is a multidisciplinary field of applied linguistics. In its study of concepts and their representations in special language, terminology borrows elements from many theoretical approaches dealing with the description, structuring and transfer of knowledge:

Cognitive science and knowledge engineering
concept formation and definition, computerized representation
Philosophy of science
concept evolution, subject classification
Lexicography and semantics
term formation, semantic features, semantic change
Logic
hierarchical versus associative relations, equivalence versus identity
Information science
database management
Computational linguistics
natural language processing, corpus analysis

Best Practices

In the practice of terminology, you may be called upon to perform various tasks in the framework of common terminology activities (which will be covered later in this module).

In order to establish or agree upon terminology, you may need to:

  • identify terms in properly selected specialized documentation;
  • build terminology case files for the terms you find or for problem cases that are assigned to you;
  • perform concept analysis and structure your knowledge into concept systems;
  • write definitions that concisely and accurately convey information about the concept designated by a term;
  • participate in standardization, which involves agreeing by consensus on the term for each concept; and
  • create terminology products with which you can share or disseminate the agreed-upon terminology.