The prescriptive school of thought in terminology holds that terms should be fixed items and should not be prone to variation. More recently, however, descriptive studies have begun to reveal that many terms do in fact have variants. This poses a challenge for language professionals such as translators and terminologists, who need to decide which form of a term to use in a given context. This article explores one specific type of variant that occurs frequently in medical language — variants that can be formed by combining elements of a term in a different order (e.g. cardiovascular vs. vasculocardiac). By studying such variants in corpora, we have identified some regular patterns that appear to reveal conceptual, linguistic and social motivations behind term choice. An understanding of these factors may help translators and terminologists to choose the most appropriate term.
2022. La traduction médicale : un panorama de ressources terminologiques multilingues. In Approches linguistiques contemporaines de la traduction, ► pp. 129 ff.
Vozna, Marina, Natalia Antonyuk, T. Andrienko, S. Potapenko & L. Slavova
2021. Equivalence in Ukrainian-English translation of institutional academic terminology. SHS Web of Conferences 105 ► pp. 03002 ff.
2018. Análisis de la función cognitiva de la variación denominativa en la Lexicografía brasileña: patrones conceptuales de variación y distancia semántica entre las variantes1. Meta 63:2 ► pp. 467 ff.
Dahm, Maria
2018. A socio-cognitive investigation of English medical terminology. Lexicography 4:1 ► pp. 81 ff.
Grön, Leonie & Ann Bertels
2018. Clinical sublanguages. Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 24:1 ► pp. 41 ff.
Peters, Pam, Yan Qian & Jun Ding
2018. Translating medical terminology and bilingual terminography. Lexicography 3:2 ► pp. 85 ff.
Schneider, Coralie
2018. Determining survival probabilities for specialised neologisms in medical English and French: a diachronic perspective. ASp 74 ► pp. 53 ff.
2013. A corpus-based approach to the multimodal analysis of specialized knowledge. Language Resources and Evaluation 47:2 ► pp. 399 ff.
Fernández-Silva, Sabela & Koen Kerremans
2011. Terminological Variation in Source Texts and Translations: A Pilot Study. Meta 56:2 ► pp. 318 ff.
Maniez, François
2011. L’apport des corpus spécialisés en terminographie multilingue : le cas des groupes nominaux de type Nom-Adjectif dans la langue médicale. Meta 56:2 ► pp. 391 ff.
Lervad, Susanne
2010. Recherche en terminologie et applications pratiques : quelques axes de collaboration avec des partenaires industriels danois. Revue française de linguistique appliquée Vol. XIV:2 ► pp. 73 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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