Construing domain knowledge via terminological understanding

This article will focus on the process of understanding terms, which is essential for translators to propose suitable translations and for terminologists to develop different types of terminological resources. We will discuss how a shift from meaning to understanding has changed our view with respect to the interaction between symbols (i.e. terms), thoughts and referents. Next, we demonstrate how this view has been applied in termontography, a methodology set up to develop ontologically-underpinned terminological resources, based on the analysis of specialised texts. We will concentrate on the categorisation framework, which is used in termontography for structuring terminological information, and discuss how this framework is currently implemented in a didactic software tool, called CatTerm, that guides student translators to construct a knowledge model of a given domain.