What it is
Sager separates two circumstances in which a designation comes into being. Primary term formation accompanies the birth of a concept: there is no pre-existing linguistic entity, the naming is often spontaneous, and it happens in one language. Secondary term formation produces a designation for a concept that already has one, either because a body revises or standardizes the terminology of its own community, or because the concept is transferred to another language community and needs naming there.
The distinction is pragmatic rather than formal. Nothing about the resulting designation tells you which circumstance produced it. What differs is what the namer worked from, and therefore what constrained them.
This is the hinge on which the other designation records turn, because of one plain consequence: a translator is never in primary term formation. The concept already exists, it is already named, and the source designation is already there on the page. Whatever the translator writes is a second designation for a concept that has one, which is the definition of the secondary case.
Where the authorities stand
The distinction is descriptive and uncontested. Two things around it are worth getting right, because both are commonly misreported.
The first is Sager's own classification of how terms are built, which is often attributed to his 1997 handbook chapter and belongs to the 1990 book, where the patterns of term formation are set out as use of existing resources, modification of existing resources, and creation of new lexical entities, that last heading carrying the word neologisms in the original.
The second concerns neonyms. It is often said that a neonym is what primary term formation produces, and that is not what the sources say. The vocabulary standard treats neonym as an admitted synonym of new term, a term specifically coined for a given general concept, with nothing about the circumstances of coining. Rondeau's own modes for forming neonyms include calque and borrowing, which are secondary procedures. A neonym is a designation new in its language, and newness in a language is compatible with the concept being old elsewhere.
There is also a real disagreement about how free the secondary namer is. One view treats the source designation as a datum: it tells you which concept is at issue and nothing more, and the new designation must answer to the target term system. Valeontis and Mantzari propose the opposite default, an analogue rule under which the namer's first choice should be a term-formation mechanism analogous to the one used for the source term. Neither position is standardized.
What the distinction does establish is that secondary formation is plannable in a way primary formation is not. Primary formation is frequently spontaneous; secondary formation is more often subject to rules and can be organized in advance. Term records, harmonization and acceptability ratings are possible only because of that.
Consequences for translation
- The translator's freedom is smaller than a subject expert's. The concept is fixed and someone else fixed it, so a coinage has to be defensible against a concept that already exists rather than against a gap.
- The source designation's morphology is evidence about the source community's habits, not an instruction. Whether to mirror it is a decision, and the literature does not settle it for you.
- Because secondary formation is plannable, it belongs in the term record before the translation rather than in the review afterwards.
- A standards body renaming a concept in its own language is also secondary formation. The same discipline applies to a monolingual revision as to a cross-language one.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: chat
- Target: clavardage
- Comment: Secondary formation carried out deliberately by a language authority. The Quebec coinage is a blend of clavier and bavardage, a target-system mechanism with no counterpart in the source designation, which makes it a clean case against the analogue rule. Whether such a coinage is adopted is a separate question from whether it is well formed: the French term for a hashtag, mot-dièse, was coined the same way and has not displaced usage.
EN>EL
- Source: software
- Target: λογισμικό
- Comment: A native coinage where the source designation offered nothing to copy. Greek terminology work produced a derived form rather than adapting the English compound, alongside πλινθίο for chip and δυφίο for bit. Each answers to the Greek term system rather than to English morphology, which is what secondary formation looks like when the target community has an active naming body.
EN>HU
- Source: due diligence
- Target: átvilágítás
- Comment: The same situation without a naming body, in a field where concepts arrive faster than terminology. Polcz and colleagues found across a corpus of online start-up glossaries that transference of the English designation dominates in every target language, and that a transparent native term was available in only a minority of cases. This is one of the minority.
References
- Sager, J. C. (1990). A Practical Course in Terminology Processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, sections 3.2.2 and 3.2.3, pp. 71 to 84.
- Rondeau, G. (1984). Introduction à la terminologie. Chicoutimi: Gaëtan Morin.
- ISO 1087:2019. Terminology work and terminology science: Vocabulary. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
- Valeontis, K. and Mantzari, E. (2006). "The Linguistic Dimension of Terminology: Principles and Methods of Term Formation." First Athens International Conference on Translation and Interpretation, 13 and 14 October 2006.
- Dincă, D. (2008). "Du néologisme au néonyme." Craiova: University of Craiova.
- Polcz, K., Hamsovszki, S., Huszár, E., Jámbor, E., Szigetváry, N. and Válóczi, M. (2023). "Translation procedures in secondary term formation across languages in online glossaries." Across Languages and Cultures 24(2).
- Office québécois de la langue française, entry clavardage, and Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française, Journal officiel, 23 January 2013, entry mot-dièse.