Socioterminology

What it is

The claim is that a term has no meaning outside the social practice that circulates it, so terminology has to be descriptive, diachronic, and attentive to who uses a designation and with what authority. Gaudin's formula is that socioterminology stands to terminology as sociolinguistics stands to linguistics: the same object, set back on its feet.

The apparatus that follows is an apparatus of variation. Designations vary by place, by social group, by period and by genre, and the variation is treated as information about the conditions under which a text was produced, circulated, received and interpreted, rather than as noise to be cleaned away. Terminology is studied where it actually happens, which for this school means institutions, workplaces and the popularizing text. Standardization is not rejected as pointless; it is described as an intervention that bends the natural behaviour of words, and whose success depends on a link to the milieu it is meant to serve.

The neighbouring record on terminological variation catalogues the phenomenon; this record is the position that the phenomenon is the subject matter, and that a theory treating it as a defect has mistaken its object.

Where the authorities stand

The premise being denied is stated most cleanly by a defender. Lerat, writing on legal terminology, sets out the traditional position as a norm that ought to be rather than a norm that is; socioterminology reverses that priority.

The standards side answered, in print, by name. Myking argues that parts of the criticism rest on an incomplete reading of Wüster, and answers the central question, whether prescriptive objectives obstruct sound terminology, in the negative. Antia, in the same issue, argues on historical grounds that description was never alien to Wüster and neither were the social auspices of terminology work. Lerat grants that socioterminology is a turning point and arguably a change of paradigm, while calling it theoretically weak.

The interesting tension is internal. The word was coined in 1981 by Boulanger, a Quebec lexicographer, in a review of Corbeil's treatise on Quebec language planning, where it named socioterminology as one of the two pillars of deliberate linguistic intervention alongside sociolinguistics. Gambier took it up and relaunched it as a programme around 1986. The anti-prescriptive theory therefore takes its name from a text about prescription, and Lerat's observation that the Quebec terms which stuck were those arrived at by negotiation is a prescriptivist conclusion reached by a socioterminological argument.

Consequences for translation

The practical content is a different attitude to evidence, and a different reading of silence in a term bank.

• An official designation is evidence that an authority decided, not that a community complied. Both facts belong on a term record, and they are not the same fact.
• A failed prescription is data. When an authority withdraws its own recommended term because it did not take, as the French commission did in replacing its 2009 designations for a mobile handset in 2018, that withdrawal is the best available evidence about usage.
• Variation should be described before it is resolved. Which variant a text carries locates its author, its audience and often its date.
• Expertise is no longer confined to the academy. Terms coined in patient communities and trade practice circulate with real authority, and a reviser who recognizes only institutional sources will miss them.

Examples

EN>PT

• Source: leprosy
• Target: hanseníase
• Comment: A Brazilian statute of 1995 bars lepra and its derivatives from federal and state official documents, for reasons of stigma rather than conceptual precision. A corpus of scientific articles shows the replacement taking hold decade by decade, and where the old form survives is the finding: historical narrative, institution names, international indexing keywords, Spanish-language abstracts and patients' own speech. The prescription holds inside the register the state controls and stops at its edge.

EN>FR

• Source: hashtag
• Target: mot-clic in Quebec; mot-dièse in France
• Comment: The Quebec office proposed mot-clic in January 2011, objecting that the character is a crosshatch and not the musical sharp; the French commission published mot-dièse two years later. Schuring and Vanderheyden's corpus puts the English borrowing above nine tenths of all uses in both their samples and attributes the failure to the interval, during which usage settled. Both coinages were well formed. Only one arrived in time.

FR>EN

• Source: responsable de comptes secteur
• Target: no settled equivalent; area sales manager, key account manager and account manager circulate in the same firm
• Comment: Parizot followed one employer's official title through three redesignations, from voyageur until the 1980s to responsable technico-commercial, dropped for its connotations, and then to the current form. The workforce kept représentant and commercial terrain, and chose among English titles when presenting themselves. The authority behind a job title is an employer; what the employees did with it is the terminological fact.

References

• Gambier, Y. (1987). "Problèmes terminologiques des pluies acides: pour une socio-terminologie." Meta 32(3), 314 to 320.
• Gaudin, F. (1993). Pour une socioterminologie: des problèmes sémantiques aux pratiques institutionnelles. Publications de l'Université de Rouen 182. Rouen: Université de Rouen, at p. 67.
• Gaudin, F. (2003). Socioterminologie: une approche sociolinguistique de la terminologie. Brussels: De Boeck and Duculot.
• Delavigne, V. and Gaudin, F. (2022). "Founding principles of Socioterminology." In P. Faber and M.-C. L'Homme (eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 23, 177 to 196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Boulanger, J.-C. (1991). "Une lecture socioculturelle de la terminologie." Cahiers de linguistique sociale 18, 13 to 30, recording his own first use of the word in Terminogramme 7 to 8 (1981), 11 to 12.
• Myking, J. (2001). "Against Prescriptivism? The 'Sociocritical' Challenge to Terminology." IITF Journal 12(1 to 2), 49 to 64.
• Antia, B. E. (2001). "Metadiscourse in Terminology: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis." IITF Journal 12(1 to 2), 65 to 84.
• Lerat, P. (2020). "La terminologie juridique." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 34(4), 1173 to 1213.
• Luz-Freitas, M. de S. and Ribeiro, P. T. (2021). "Hanseníase: um caso bem-sucedido de intervenção terminológica?" Estudos Linguísticos (São Paulo) 50(2), 685 to 705.
• Schuring, M. and Vanderheyden, A. (2022). "Parlez-vous #hashtag?" SHS Web of Conferences 138, 11015.
• Parizot, A. (2014). "Entre socioterminologie et ethnoterminologie de l'entreprise." Textes et contextes 9.