What it is
Designations are built, and the building methods fall into a small number of families. Valeontis and Mantzari group them under three headings: creating new forms, using existing forms, and translingual borrowing. Within the second, they distinguish conversion, terminologization, transdisciplinary borrowing and semantic transfer, which is the division a translator needs most.
Morphological formation covers derivation and compounding. Compounding runs across an orthographic spectrum from fused through hyphenated to open, and the spelling is not the point: the same term appears as first-class and first class in one lexicon without ceasing to be one unit. Neoclassical compounding from Greek and Latin combining forms is the family that matters most for translation, because it produces a convergent international layer. Retinopathy is inter-linguistically transparent, and its French, German, Italian and Portuguese counterparts are recognizable from it, which is why a translator can often carry such a form across with only morphological adjustment.
Conversion assigns an existing word to a new grammatical category without any change of form, and is productive in terminology as well as in general language: step section serves as noun and verb in the same biomedical lexicon.
Where the authorities stand
Abbreviation is where the standards are precise and where practice is careless. The vocabulary standard separates an acronym from an initialism by pronunciation rather than by orthography: both are made from the initial letters or syllables of the full form, but an acronym is pronounced syllabically, as a word, and an initialism letter by letter. Laser is an acronym on that criterion and FBI is an initialism, and nothing about how they are printed says so. A clipped term is a third thing again, an abbreviation made from a truncated term.
The translator-facing consequence is that an abbreviated form is a designation in its own right, with its own status, and it is language-specific. It has to be looked up rather than carried over.
Semantic transfer is the fourth family and often the most productive at the frontier of a field. Its output has a characteristic hazard: the metaphor dies, the term remains, and the translator meets a dead metaphor that reads as a live one. Tokar's case is firewall, which does not designate a wall that stops fire and cannot be rendered by a German compound built on that reading. Rossi traces the junk family, from junk DNA in molecular biology into junk bond and junk food, and shows the designations travelling between fields and languages as units rather than as images.
One point where authorities genuinely differ, and where a reference should not pretend otherwise, is the marking of eponyms. Style authorities in medicine prescribe the non-possessive form, on the ground that the syndrome does not belong to the person; national health authorities continue to print the possessive. The honest statement is that possessive marking is house style, and that a translator should follow the target publication's rather than the source's.
Consequences for translation
- Look up abbreviations as designations. Language-specific forms are the rule, not the exception, and an unlocalized abbreviation is a visible error to a target-language reader.
- A neoclassical compound is usually portable and a native compound usually is not. The first can often be adapted morphologically; the second has to be looked up.
- Recognize a dead terminological metaphor as a term. Re-imaging it in the target language produces a designation nobody uses and a picture the source did not intend.
- Compounding asymmetries are systematic. German compounds are more frequently rendered by English phrases than the reverse, so the direction of a pair predicts where the repackaging work will fall.
Examples
DE>EN
- Source: Umweltverträglichkeitsprüfung (UVP)
- Target: Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
- Comment: Two mechanisms in one entry, and both are language-specific. One German lexical unit corresponds to three English ones, which is the direction Berg found to be the more common. The abbreviation is then formed from whichever designation the language actually has, so the German initialism cannot be carried into English at all: the target form has to be retrieved, not derived.
EN>FR
- Source: DNA
- Target: ADN
- Comment: An initialism built on the full designation in each language, so the letters reorder when the words do. A French reference work listing the abbreviations for deoxyribonucleic acid marks DNA explicitly as the English-language form, which is exactly the status point: the abbreviation belongs to a language, not to the concept.
EN>ES
- Source: AIDS
- Target: sida
- Comment: The end state of an abbreviation's life. The Spanish form began as an acronym of the full designation, is pronounced as a word, and has since lexicalized to the point where the standard dictionary of the language enters it in lower case as an ordinary noun. Spanish also keeps the disease and the virus lexically apart, sida against VIH, which English does not do with the same clarity.
References
- 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, section 4.2.
- ISO 1087:2019. Terminology work and terminology science: Vocabulary. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization, entries 3.4.15 to 3.4.17.
- ISO 704:2009. Terminology work: Principles and methods, 3rd edition. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization, clause 7.4 and Annex B.
- Berg, T. (2017). "Compounding in German and English: A quantitative translation study." Languages in Contrast 17(1), 43 to 68.
- Rossi, M. (2017). "Terminological metaphors and the nomadism of specialised terms." In P. Drouin et al. (eds), Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 18, 181 to 211. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Tokar, A. "Internet Metaphors: a Cross-Linguistic Perspective." Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación V, 209 to 220.
- Krimpas, P. G. (2023). "Latinate terminology in Modern Greek." Journal of Greek Linguistics 23.
- Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, entry sida, and Real Academia Nacional de Medicina, note on sida and VIH.