Cognitive approaches to terminology

What it is

Two proposals that the field files together, and that share an opponent. Both start from the observation that specialized concepts behave the way cognitive science says categories behave, and both conclude that the classical apparatus fits only the well-behaved minority.

Temmerman's version is a set of substitutions. The concept becomes a unit of understanding; the assumption of clear boundaries becomes prototype structure; the intensional definition becomes a template whose shape varies with the type of category and with what the reader needs; univocity becomes functional synonymy and polysemy; synchrony becomes diachrony. The argument is empirical, built on a corpus of life-sciences publications, and she does not claim every term is fuzzy. Intron, in her account, keeps its one-to-one reference. Blotting and biotechnology do not, and for those the polysemy, the synonymy and the figurative language are part of the naming history rather than defects in it.

Faber's version starts one level up. Before modelling the concepts of a domain, model the event the domain is about, so that a prototypical domain event supplies roles, an agent, a process, a patient, a result, instruments, and concepts are described by the roles they fill. Two subdomains sharing a concept can then foreground different roles and produce different but equally legitimate descriptions of it.

Where the authorities stand

Both positions are argued against the standardizing tradition rather than against a clause. Temmerman's stated target is the Vienna school, its five principles and the univocity ideal; her 1998 article says so in its title and its abstract. She does not cite ISO 704, and the record should not say she does.

Anyone comparing editions of that standard needs care, because the numbering moves. Term formation sits at clause 7.3 in the 2000 edition, 7.4 in 2009 and 7.6 in 2022. The 2022 edition also adds a subclause on relations between designations and concepts, with named subclauses for synonymy and for polysemy and homonymy, where the 2009 clause on designations stopped at symbols. That is a structural observation, not a doctrinal one, but it is the sort of change a critique can claim to have provoked.

The best worked demonstration of the frame-based claim is recent and is not Faber's own. Reimerink, León-Araúz and Cabezas-García set out a definitional template for pollution with two agents and two results: the polluter, the pollutant, the damage to the environment, and the liability and sanctions that follow. Environmental science foregrounds the substance and environmental law the party responsible, so the same concept receives two differently weighted templates in adjacent subdomains. It is a pilot study in English only.

The prototype claim has harder institutional evidence behind it than theory usually gets. Cabezas-García and Reimerink show that no single operational definition of forest can carry all the dimensions the concept activates, and that official definitions differ on the canopy threshold alone, one international figure setting it above ten per cent and an earlier one at about twenty.

Consequences for translation

The working payoff is a different diagnosis of what a hard term is doing.

• Where a source concept resists a fixed set of characteristics, the failure is not the translator's. Record the dimensions that vary and let the client decide which the target text needs.
• A definitional threshold set by a national instrument travels with the concept. Rendering a term whose definition depends on a numeric cutoff into a jurisdiction that sets a different one is choosing a definition, not a word.
• Variation carries information, and flattening it destroys the information. Where variants encode stance, period or subdomain, consistency enforced mechanically is a loss.
• More specific terms vary less. A long hyponym tends to be stable where its shorter superordinate is not, which is a usable rule when deciding how much variation to tolerate in a revision.

Examples

EN>ES

• Source: climate change
• Target: cambio climático; crisis climática; emergencia climática
• Comment: Reimerink and colleagues track the Spanish parliamentary record moving from reto climático in 2015 to crisis climática in 2018 and emergencia climática from 2019, and find more variants on the left of the chamber than on the right. Each designation foregrounds a different facet and seeks a different response. Univocity here would not be an unattainable ideal; it would destroy the information the variation carries.

ES>EN

• Source: emisiones provocadas por el hombre; emisiones procedentes de fuentes humanas; emisiones antropogénicas
• Target: anthropogenic emissions
• Comment: León-Araúz and colleagues found the three Spanish forms alternating for one concept. The English compound buries the agent inside a Greek-derived adjective; Spanish can bury it too, name it as a source, or make it an actor. The choice is which role of the domain event to bring to the surface, and a translator working into English has to recognize all three as one concept before deciding anything else.

References

• Temmerman, R. (1998). "Why traditional terminology theory impedes a realistic description of categories and terms in the life sciences." Terminology 5(1), 77 to 92.
• Temmerman, R. (2000). Towards New Ways of Terminology Description: The sociocognitive approach. Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, chapters 3 and 4.
• Temmerman, R. (2022). "Units of understanding in Sociocognitive Terminology studies." In P. Faber and M.-C. L'Homme (eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 23, 331 to 352. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Faber, P. (ed.) (2012). A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language. Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 20. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
• Faber, P. (2022). "Frame-based Terminology." In the 2022 volume above, 353 to 376.
• Ureña Gómez-Moreno, J. M. and Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F. J. (2022). "Conceptual metaphors." In the same volume, 377 to 396.
• Faber Benítez, P. (2009). "The cognitive shift in terminology and specialized translation." MonTI 1, 107 to 134, at pp. 116 to 124.
• Gläser, R. (2004). Review of Temmerman (2000). Lexikos 14, 434 to 439.
• Reimerink, A., León-Araúz, P. and Cabezas-García, M. (2024). "Phraseology and Culture in Terminological Knowledge Bases: The Case of Pollution and Environmental Law." Languages 9(3), article 84.
• Reimerink, A., Cabezas-García, M., León-Araúz, P. and Faber, P. (2024). "Ideological Knowledge Representation: Framing Climate Change in EcoLexicon." In Proceedings of LREC-COLING 2024, 8617 to 8626.
• León-Araúz, P., Cabezas-García, M. and Reimerink, A. (2020). "Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: a Corpus-Based Study." In Proceedings of LREC 2020, 2358 to 2367.
• Cabezas-García, M. and Reimerink, A. (2022). "Cultural Context and Multimodal Knowledge Representation: Seeing the Forest for the Trees." Frontiers in Psychology 13, article 824932.
• ISO 704:2000, ISO 704:2009 and ISO 704:2022. Terminology work: Principles and methods, 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization, clauses 7.3, 7.4 and 7.6 respectively.