What it is
The previous record establishes that a concept often has several designations. This one answers the question a translator asks when it happens: why does this concept have four names in my corpus, and does the number tell me anything?
Freixa's typology sorts the causes into five families. Dialectal causes trace variation to the different origins of the authors. Functional causes trace it to different communicative registers. Discursive causes trace it to the stylistic and expressive needs of the author, which in practice means avoiding repetition, economy, and emphasis. Interlinguistic causes trace it to contact between languages. Cognitive causes trace it to different conceptualizations and motivations, that is, to authors who do not see the referent the same way.
The typology repays use because the families point at different remedies. A dialectal variant is a fact about where the text came from, and knowing that fixes it. A cognitive variant is a fact about how the author frames the concept and cannot be fixed at all, only recorded.
Where the authorities stand
The standing is descriptive: nobody prescribes these causes and nobody disputes them. What needs care is attribution, because this literature relabels itself constantly.
The five families above are Freixa's, and her own framing includes a preliminary group of preconditions sitting behind them, namely linguistic redundancy, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, and the variation the language permits in the first place. Her 2022 chapter resumes the study and updates the proposal with a literature review rather than replacing it. Finer subdivisions circulate widely and belong to whoever made them.
Biel's adaptation of the typology to legal settings is the clearest case. She states that she is adjusting Freixa's typology rather than reporting it, rereads the geographic cause as intersystemic variation across legal systems and the interlinguistic cause as legal transplants and translation, and adds a cause Freixa does not list: unmotivated variation, attributable to error, lack of care, insufficient knowledge or inadequate quality control. That last category is useful precisely because it is not dignified: some variation is a mistake, and a typology with no room for mistakes will explain them away.
The instability of the labels can be shown rather than asserted. Faber and León-Araúz set out a category of dimensional variants, multiword terms conveying different dimensions of one concept. A later paper reusing the same taxonomy renames that category cognitive variants and demotes dimensional to a subtype beneath it. Same taxonomy, same authors involved, different label four years on.
The practical payload follows from the causes being social and cognitive rather than merely lexical. Variation cannot be eliminated. Deprecated designations keep appearing in corpora, which is why a working knowledge base needs a category for non-recommended variants rather than simply excluding them, and why diachronic variants go on being used in looser contexts after they have stopped being authoritative.
Consequences for translation
Naming the cause tells a reviser what they are looking at, and therefore whether anything needs doing.
- A discursive variant in the source is the author avoiding repetition. It does not license the same move in the target, and in prescriptive text it must not be reproduced.
- A cognitive variant is a signal, not noise. Where two designations reflect two conceptualizations, choosing between them takes a position, and the term record should say so.
- An interlinguistic variant means the target community already carries a borrowing beside a native form. Which to use is a question about the readership, not about correctness.
- Unmotivated variation exists and is diagnosed by exclusion. If none of the causes fits, the correct response is a query rather than a theory.
Examples
EN>PL
- Source: adoption
- Target: przysposobienie / adopcja
- Comment: A functional cause, visible in the register split. Biel records that the Polish legal term, derived from a rare dated verb, has a popular general-language variant beside it. English carries one designation across both registers, so the choice exists only on the Polish side and is decided by whether the text is legislative or explanatory.
EN>ES
- Source: smog
- Target: smog / esmog
- Comment: An interlinguistic cause producing an orthographic pair. The borrowing entered Spanish and now coexists with an adapted spelling, so one English designation faces two Spanish forms that differ in nothing but how far the borrowing has been naturalized. The decision is about the readership and the house style, and no analysis of the concept will settle it.
LA>ES
- Source: Dracaena draco
- Target: drago
- Comment: A functional cause across the specialist and lay levels, with the scientific nomenclature on one side and the vernacular designation on the other. English likewise has dragon tree beside the binomial. The pair is a reminder that a nomenclature does not suppress variation: it adds a designation with a different status, and the vernacular forms go on living beside it.
References
- Freixa, J. (2006). "Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal." Terminology 12(1), 51 to 77.
- Freixa, J. (2006). "Variación terminológica: ¿Por qué y para qué?" In A. Clas et al. (eds), Pour une traductologie proactive. Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
- Freixa, J. (2022). "Causes of terminological variation." In P. Faber and M.-C. L'Homme (eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 23, 399 to 420. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Faber, P. and León-Araúz, P. (2016). "Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context." Frontiers in Psychology 7, 196.
- León-Araúz, P., Cabezas-García, M. and Reimerink, A. (2020). "Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: a Corpus-Based Study." Proceedings of LREC 2020, 2358 to 2367.
- Biel, Ł. (2023). "Variation of legal terms in monolingual and multilingual contexts: Types, distribution, attitudes and causes." In Ł. Biel and H. J. Kockaert (eds), Handbook of Terminology, Volume 3: Legal Terminology, 90 to 123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.