Variation in the translation of terms

Collecting, studying and managing terms and their translations in multilingual terminological resources are essential steps to be carried out within a terminography workflow. This article starts from the observation that this activity is to a large extent still determined by a traditional conviction that terms should be used unambiguously to refer to clearly delineated concepts in order to arrive at unambiguous communication (Wüster 1979; Felber 1984; Picht and Draskau 1985). Consequently, this view or conviction has a major impact on the function, design and implementation of many ‘structured’ terminological products such as terminological databases, glossaries or dictionaries. Looking at terms and their translations from a descriptive point of view – i.e. by studying term occurrences and their translations in parallel, specialised texts – we argue that ‘structured’ terminology resources are not able to fully cover the different ‘linguistic options’ found in texts to refer to specialised knowledge in different cognitive, situational and linguistic contexts. We will illustrate this point on the basis of a comparative study between a parallel corpus comprised of English EU source texts and their translations into French and Dutch and a selection of terminological records from the EU's IATE terminology base . We will report on how the research was carried out (applying a corpus-driven method), present the major qualitative and quantitative findings and discuss the implications of the research for the way the terminography workflow being taught as part of the Master’s Programme in Translation at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.