Terminology and documentation*  Object of the study of terminology:  analysis and description of the units representing specialized knowledge in specialized discourse  Object of the study of documentation:  organize the information found in documents and conveyed by means of terminological units (TU) * GROUP IULATERM Barcelona : IULA. Pompeu Fabra University

Terminology and documentation In theory and in practice, terminology and documentation are interrelated:  Terminological work cannot be carried out without documentation  At least part of the documentary work cannot be carried out without terminology  Terminology is therefore necessary for documentary work and documents are the basis for any terminological work.

Terminology Basic elements of terminological work:  all terminological projects are founded on practical professional needs  they are expected to answer these professional needs  they are expected to be adequate to the communicative situation which is defined on parameters such as professional activity, domain and specific topic, sociolinguistic context, language function or specific addressees

Documentation Documentation is necessary to terminology:  it makes the description of terms possible, because terminological units are fundamental elements of the oral and written discourse produced by specialists;  it helps develop a theory of “terms” in context

Documentation  Terminological units  convey the concepts of a certain special field  interrelate and transfer knowledge under certain circumstances and for certain communication purposes  Communication takes place through oral and written discourse  This discourse conforms texts (documents) that are the object of documentation

Documentation  Terms appear in specialized communication when specialists have to name a concept of their discipline  Terminologists retrieve from the documents the units they will integrate in dictionaries to be consulted by specialists and other users  specialized texts are the natural habitat of these terms  Documentation is the source of terminographical work

Stages of documentation  preparation stage: necessary source of information to acquire the cognitive competence  terminological work to begin with selection and analysis of the specialized documentation  works supplying this information: specialized works, lexicographic collections, encyclopedias or atlases.

Stages of documentation  stage 1: detection, delimitation and extraction of terms from documents  in this phase, documents (texts) are the only testimonial source which can vouch for the use of the terms in the special subject field and for their grammatical and semantic features  Documents allow to evaluate the frequency with which the term appears in its context of use.

Stages of documentation  Taking documents as a parameter, units are selected and confronted, certain forms are rejected being too general, other forms may be rejected because they belong to different subject areas  terms are analyzed and compilation of terminological records is carried out  terminological records gather, for each term, a series of linguistic and pragmatic data

Terminology as representation of specialized knowledge  Specialized texts convey specialized content through technical terms  Each terminological unit corresponds to a cognitive node in a special field  the whole of these nodes linked to one another by specific relations constitutes the conceptual representation of that special field  Therefore, specialized reality can be represented through terminology