What it is
A concept in a language community may have one designation or several. Whether having several is a fault is one of the few questions in terminology on which the field is openly and permanently split.
The formal types are well described. Orthographic variants differ only in spelling or hyphenation, as case law does from case-law. Morphosyntactic variants differ in morphology or in the arrangement of the same elements, as contract of employment does from employment contract. Abbreviated and extended forms sit on one axis, running from a full designation through a short form to a clipping or an initialism, and outward again to forms that add qualifying material. Register variants distribute across the levels at which a field is written about, from legislative through descriptive to plain general language.
The boundary against the neighbouring technique record is the one to hold. There, a translator reaches for a near-synonym to vary a text, which is a decision. Here, the community's designation inventory contains several designations for one concept, which is a fact the translator finds rather than makes.
Where the authorities stand
Three positions, all in print, and they do not reconcile.
Legislative drafting doctrine treats variation as a defect without qualification. The European Union's drafting guide requires terminology to be consistent both internally and with acts already in force, that identical concepts be expressed in the same terms, and that identical terms not be used for different concepts. Drafting manuals in the common law tradition make the same demand in blunter terms, on the ground that a court will assume any inconsistency was deliberate and will invent a distinction that nobody intended.
Terminology scholarship says the opposite. Freixa situates variation as a natural and necessary feature of terminological units, a claim about what terminology is rather than about what it should be. Pecman goes further and attributes a positive function to it, arguing that a scientist may deploy variation deliberately as a means of theorizing and of explaining a concept better.
Biel supplies the observation that partly dissolves the argument: the two camps are describing different genres. Variation can be expected to be minimized in legislation, where it violates the consistency principle, while judgments are more interpretive and contextualized and therefore tolerate stylistic and cohesive variation, as do texts with a pedagogical function. Less specialized genres show the most. So the drafters and the descriptivists are both right about the material they look at.
The diachronic dimension belongs here too, and Dury's argument is that the changes terms and concepts undergo over time should count as part of variation rather than as a separate subject. Designations are retired, and when a naming authority does the retiring the record is exact. The World Health Organization replaced monkeypox with mpox in 2022, gave its reason, which was documented stigmatizing use of the older name, set a transition year in which both would stand, and kept the old designation searchable in the disease classification so that historic records would still match. That is what a controlled retirement looks like, and it is rarer than the literature's confidence suggests.
Consequences for translation
- Establish the genre before treating variation as an error. In legislation it is a defect; in a judgment or a textbook it may be deliberate.
- Variation cannot be eliminated, only managed. A term base that records only one designation per concept will be contradicted by any corpus, and the contradiction will surface as an apparent inconsistency in the delivery.
- A retired designation stays findable and stays in old documents. Historic material has to be translated with the terminology of its date, and the term record should carry the retirement date rather than delete the old form.
- Variation in the source and in the target are separate facts. A source that varies does not license a target that varies.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: phishing
- Target: hameçonnage
- Comment: One stable English designation against a French inventory that has been revised twice. The Commission responsible for enriching the French language recommended filoutage in 2006 and, in 2021, published hameçonnage in a record that annuls and replaces the earlier term. The English borrowing continues to circulate in French beside the recommended form, so the French community currently carries two live designations and one retired one for a concept English names once.
EN>ES
- Source: sulphur
- Target: azufre
- Comment: Variation confined to one side of the pair, with two standardizing bodies disagreeing. A Canadian term bank records sulfur and sulphur as both correct, notes that a national environment agency adopted the second while the international chemical nomenclature body recommends the first, and labels brimstone obsolete while keeping it on the record. Spanish has one designation, so a translator into Spanish has nothing to vary and a translator into English has a house-style decision that no dictionary settles.
References
- Pecman, M. (2014). "Variation as a cognitive device: How scientists construct knowledge through term formation." Terminology 20(1), 1 to 24.
- Dury, P. (2022). "Diachronic variation." In P. Faber and M.-C. L'Homme (eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 23, 421 to 434. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Freixa, J. (2022). "Causes of terminological variation." In the same volume, 399 to 420.
- Biel, Ł. (2023). "Variation of legal terms in monolingual and multilingual contexts: Types, distribution, attitudes and causes." In Ł. Biel and H. J. Kockaert (eds), Handbook of Terminology, Volume 3: Legal Terminology, 90 to 123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- European Parliament, Council and Commission (2015). Joint Practical Guide for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation, 2nd edition. Luxembourg: Publications Office, guideline 6.
- World Health Organization (2022). WHO recommends new name for monkeypox disease, 28 November 2022, and Best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases, 8 May 2015.
- Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française, FranceTerme record JURI83, hameçonnage, Journal officiel of 14 September 2021.