Chapter published in:
Science Communication in Times of Crisis
Edited by Pascal Hohaus
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 96] 2022
► pp. 65–90

Chapter 4
Pivoting to support science communication in times of crisis

A case study of the Government of Canada’s Glossary on the COVID-19 pandemic

| University of Ottawa

Much of the literature on crisis communication observes that, in the best cases, a crisis can lead to opportunity. The COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for the Government of Canada’s Translation Bureau, a group that regularly creates glossaries of specialized terminology, to re-orient the coverage of their Glossary on the COVID-19 pandemic to include better support for expert-to-non-expert communication. This chapter explains the conventional process for terminology work, and then examines the ways in which the Translation Bureau’s terminologists broke with convention by working with an evolving terminology, privileging terminological transparency, adopting a multi-subject field perspective, and including de-terminologized items in the glossary. The chapter ends with some suggestions for improving such hybrid resources moving forward (e.g. explicitly distinguishing more specialized and less specialized terms, providing more accessible definitions).

Keywords: terminology, de-terminologization, language for special purposes, language of science, science communication
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Science communication and crisis communication
  • Terminology work
  • De-terminologization
  • Traditional terminology work
  • Users of traditional terminology resources
  • The Translation Bureau and the development of the Glossary on the COVID-19 pandemic
    • The need for speed
    • Transparency of terms
    • A multifaceted perspective
    • A broader notion of “termhood”
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.96.04bow
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