The authors discuss terms and the concepts they represent in the highly-specific domain of cattle disease in Cameroon. These terms and concepts are variously understood by veterinary personnel professionally trained in French on the one hand and nomadic cattle farmers typically speaking Fulfulde on the other. The fact that the knowledge is mapped differently, can lead to dangerous false assumptions on the part of the farmers about relevant treatments, which can in turn cause public health problems by allowing diseased animals into the food chain. The conceptual differences are also overlaid with linguistic mismatches within the local language, for example, different relations of synonymy, and between languages, where equivalences remain unclear. The article concludes that terms and their predications provide access to knowledge structures and that studying terms as understood by different but mutually interested discourse communities can therefore make a contribution to knowledge management.