Variation in the organization of medical terms

Abstract

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.cardiovascularvs.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.

Enriching terminology resources with knowledge-rich contexts

“…Particularly for these latter classes, observing the variants and synonyms, as well as their relationships with other items, may help to guide the user in the selection of the most appropriate term for a given context (cf. Bowker and Hawkins 2006).…”

A proposed method for analysing the dynamics of cognition through term variation

“…The existence of different schools of thought is a frequently mentioned cause of term variation (Bowker and Hawkins 2006;Collet 2007;Freixa 2006). However, to our knowledge no studies have investigated this issue in depth.…”

“…Consequently, instead of using the correct terminological expression for a precise concept, he might choose another term reflecting a slight shift in this concept's meaning. This phenomenon is also referred to as "point of view" (Gaudin 2003), "vision" (Boisson 2001), and "motivation" (Bowker and Hawkins 2006;Kocourek 1991), among others.…”

“…In that sense, Bowker and Hawkins (2006) present an instructive case using examples from the nomenclature for disease. Terms designating diseases were historically drawn from physical manifestations of the disease's symptoms.…”

L’apport des corpus spécialisés en terminographie multilingue : le cas des groupes nominaux de type Nom-Adjectif dans la langue médicale

“…L'apport des corpus dans le processus d'extraction terminologique, clairement perçu dès le début des années 1990, a notamment amené les spécialistes du traitement automatique de la langue à se pencher sur les propriétés lexicales et syntaxiques des adjectifs relationnels, éléments-clés de la formation des termes complexes (Daille 2001), la réflexion sur le rôle de l'adjectif dans la formation des termes ayant été poursuivie par Normand et Bourigaud (2001), L'Homme (2004) puis Bowker et Hawkins (2006). Les capacités de stockage informatique allant croissant, l'abondance des données fournies par les grands corpus textuels amène les terminologues à se poser un certain nombre de questions, dont les suivantes : la fréquence d'emploi en corpus est-elle un critère fiable d'inclusion terminographique ?…”