1.1.3. Basic Concepts and Best Practices
Terminology is a multidisciplinary field of applied linguistics. In its study of concepts and their representations in special language, terminology borrows elements from many theoretical approaches dealing with the description, structuring and transfer of knowledge:
| Cognitive science and knowledge engineering |
concept formation and definition, computerized representation |
| Philosophy of science |
concept evolution, subject classification |
| lexicography and semantics |
term formation, semantic
features,
semantic change |
| Logic |
hierarchical versus associative relations, equivalence versus identity |
| Information science |
database management |
| Computational linguistics |
natural language processing, corpus analysis |
Best Practices
In the practice of terminology, you may be called upon to perform various tasks in the framework of common terminology activities (which will be covered later in this module).
In order to establish or agree upon terminology, you may need to:
- identify terms in properly selected specialized documentation;
- build terminology case files for the terms you find or for problem cases that are assigned to you;
- perform concept analysis and structure your knowledge into concept systems;
- write definitions that concisely and accurately convey information about the concept designated by a term;
- participate in standardization, which involves agreeing by consensus on the term for each concept; and
- create terminology products with which you can share or disseminate the agreed-upon terminology.
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