Translation-oriented terminography in the face of intercultural concept variation

The present thesis focuses on the asymmetries between the specialized concept fields adopted by linguistic communities from different cultures using different languages or language variants. These asymmetries create variation between the concepts referred to by specialized communities in different cultural (and commonly geographical) environments and manifest themselves as practical problems of mainly two kinds: terminological gaps and seeming identicalness of similar concepts commonly named "non-equivalence" and "quasi-equivalence" respectively in the specialized discourse of terminology and terminography. The phenomenon of intercultural concept variation and the potential practical intercultural communication problems it creates especially in the context of translation has been much less widely discussed in the context of specialized translation than it has been in the context of general and literary translation, and even much more scarcely in the context of terminology. This is quite natural because since the outset of terminology as a discipline in its own right, the raison d'etre of terminology and the rationalé of terminology work has largely been considered to be unifying concepts and concept systems by eliminating intercultural differences pertaining to them rather than managing these differences; mainly due to the influence of what is known as the General Theory of Terminology and its practical significance for accurate specialized communication both within and across different language communities. Despite the emergence of more recent and more descriptively oriented strands of the discipline of terminology such as the socioterminological (Gaudin 1993), communicative (Cabré 1999, 2003), sociocognitive (Temmerman 1997, 2000) and frame-based (Faber et al. 2005) approaches, the dominant terminographical models are still based on data organization structures whose design largely reflects the traditional normative approach aiming at eliminating all kinds of conceptual variation. Narrowing down its scope to non-normative, translation-oriented terminography in conventional translation environments characterized by mostly ad hoc terminology work, limitations with respect to time and resources, and the use of Translation Environment Tools (TEnT), the present thesis focuses on the terminographical models to be used in this type of situations where intercultural concept variation is not eliminated for practical or socio-political reasons. To observe the landscape, current established terminographical models and practices are examined both through industry best practices laid out by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and through common, established termbanks. These observations demonstrate partial incompatibility between these data organization schemes designed mainly for systematic work towards normative purposes and translation-oriented terminography characterized by ad hoc, largely descriptive terminology work. Attempts to cope with the problems that arise due to this incompatibility have also been observed and critically evaluated. Drawing from these observations and critical evaluations, terminographical suggestions with respect to data entry and organization are developed. Taking into consideration the practical limitations of conventional, smaller-scale working environments where the use of existing ready-made terminographical infrastructures is crucial, these suggestions are developed on one of the most widely adopted terminographical infrastructures in the language services industry (TBX). Moreover, because ready-made solutions are critical for the described usage context, the suggestions are formulated in the form of a supplementary modification to the data category selection of TBX-Basic, a terminological markup language providing a ready-made data category selection and data structure designed to be and commonly recognized as one of the most language industry relevant interchange format.