What it is
Two directions of travel across the same ground. Semasiology begins with a form, a word or a fixed phrase, and asks what it means. Onomasiology begins with a concept and asks what it is called. The material is identical. What changes is which end is held fixed and which end is searched for.
The distinction is old enough to have a documented naming. Zauner attached the label to his 1902 study of the Romance words for parts of the body, a piece of work that took one concept at a time and collected the designations several languages had assigned to it. Trier's lexical fields, three decades later, described a vocabulary as a mosaic in which extending the sense of one word narrows its neighbours, which is a claim about designations competing for conceptual ground rather than about any word in isolation. Blank puts the two questions in their plainest modern form: semasiology asks after the senses of a given form, onomasiology asks after the denominations of a given concept.
The neighbouring record is the one on objects, concepts and designations. That record says what the three corners are; this one says which corner the search starts from.
Where the authorities stand
No standards body prescribes a direction of search, which is why the standing here is descriptive. What is settled is that the two orientations build different objects. A terminological resource is concept-oriented: one entry per concept, with every designation that names it sitting under that entry, across whichever languages the resource covers. A dictionary is form-oriented: one entry per word form, with every sense that form carries listed beneath it. Chiocchetti, Lušicky and Wissik state the split without hedging, contrasting lexicographic products, which follow a semasiological approach, with terminographic products, which follow an onomasiological one and are concept-oriented. Wright's survey of the standards describes the same range, running from word-oriented models to concept-oriented terminological resources.
The two structures do not merge cleanly. A record organized around a form will sooner or later carry two concepts that share a string, and every equivalent hung on it inherits the ambiguity.
A translator works semasiologically by default and has little choice about it: a source text supplies forms, not concepts. The onomasiological move has to be made deliberately, and only becomes available once the concept has been reconstructed from the text. That reconstruction, rather than the label, is the practical content of the distinction.
Consequences for translation
The move is worth making precisely when the ordinary lookup has failed, which is also the moment at which it is least likely to occur to anyone.
- A failed dictionary search is not evidence that no equivalent exists. It is evidence that no equivalent shares enough form with the source to be reachable from the string. Reconstructing the concept, then searching the target language for that concept, reaches equivalents that share no material at all with the source designation.
- The reconstruction is done from the text: the superordinate the term is placed under, the characteristics the text attributes to it, the operations it is said to undergo. This is componential analysis put to a search purpose rather than a comparative one.
- Where the concept cannot be matched, the onomasiological frame at least produces a defensible description rather than a guess, because the characteristics that failed to match are the ones the description has to carry.
- Term records should be built the way the resource is built, one per concept. A record keyed to a source string will eventually collect equivalents belonging to two different concepts, and the next translator has no way to tell them apart.
Examples
NL>EN
- Source: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek
- Target: Statistics Netherlands
- Comment: The two designations share no material whatever, and no operation on the Dutch string produces the English one. What a form-driven search yields is the calque, Central Bureau for Statistics, which the body itself does not use. Only the concept, a single named institution, connects the two, and the English designation is verifiable on the institution's own English pages.
IT>EN
- Source: proprietà
- Target: ownership
- Comment: Here the resemblance is the trap rather than the help. Cao sets the Italian concept against English property and finds it narrower, closer to ownership than to the wider common-law notion. The cognate is what a semasiological search returns first, and it is wrong by exactly the amount that the two extensions differ.
DE>FR
- Source: Vertrag
- Target: contrat
- Comment: A pair that survives inspection at the form end and fails at the concept end. The comparison is Šarčević's, reproduced by Cao: the German concept is considerably the broader, while the French is restricted to transactions involving mutuality of agreement and obligation. Nothing in either designation signals the difference, so it can only be found by asking what each one covers.
References
- Zauner, A. (1902). Die romanischen Namen der Körperteile: eine onomasiologische Studie. Erlangen: F. Junge. Also published in Romanische Forschungen 14 (1903), 339 to 530.
- Trier, J. (1931). Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes: die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Germanische Bibliothek 2. Abt., Bd. 31.
- Blank, A. (2001). "Words and Concepts in Time: towards Diachronic Cognitive Onomasiology." metaphorik.de 01/2001, 6 to 25.
- Wright, S. E. (2022). "Terminology and standards." In P. Faber and M.-C. L'Homme (eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology: Explaining terms, concepts and specialized knowledge, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 23, 87 to 110. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Chiocchetti, E., Lušicky, V. and Wissik, T. (2023). "Multilingual legal terminology databases: Workflows and roles." In Ł. Biel and H. J. Kockaert (eds), Handbook of Terminology, Volume 3: Legal Terminology, 458 to 484. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Cao, D. (2007). "Legal Terminological Issues in Translation." Ch. 4 of Translating Law, 53 to 73. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, at p. 56.