Representing intra- and interlingual terminological variation in a new type of translation resource: a prototype proposal

In this study, terminological variation pertains to the different ways in which specialised knowledge is expressed in written discourse by means of terminological designations. Choices regarding the use of term variants in source texts (i.e. intralingual variation) as well as the different translations of these variants in target texts (i.e. interlingual variation) are determined by a complex interplay of contextual factors of several kinds. For translators, it is therefore important to know the different language options (i.e. variants) that are available when translating terms and to know in which situational contexts certain options are more likely to be used.
To this end, translators often consult bi- or multilingual translation resources (e.g. terminological databases) to find solutions to certain translation problems. Different possibilities are offered in terminological databases to represent and visualise intra- and interlingual variants. In conventional terminology bases, terms in several languages usually appear on concept-oriented term records. This particular way of structuring and visualising terminological data has its roots in prescriptive terminology in which terms are merely viewed as ‘labels’ assigned to clearly delineated concepts (Picht and Draskau 1985). In ontologically-underpinned terminological knowledge bases or TKBs, terminological data tend to be represented in networks comprised of conceptual and semantic relations (Kerremans et al. 2008; Faber 2011; Durán Muñoz 2012; Peruzzo 2013). As opposed to traditional ways of representing terminological data (e.g. on the basis of alphabetically sorted lists, tables or matrices), such networks allow for a flexible and dynamic visualisation of data that may be connected to one another in several ways.
The aim of this article is to reflect on how visualisations of terms, variants and their translations in networks can be improved by taking into account the contextual constraints of the texts in which they appear. To this end, a novel type of translation resource has been developed, resulting from a semi-automatic method for identifying intralingual variants and their translations in texts.
A prototype visualisation of this resource will be presented in which terms, variants and their translations appear as a contextually-conditioned network of ‘language options’. The proposed model derives from the Hallidayan premise that each language option or choice acquires its meaning against the background of other choices which could have been made. The choices are perceived as functional: i.e. they can be motivated against the backdrop of a complex set of contextual conditions (Eggins 2004). Changing these contextual conditions causes direct changes in the network of terminological options that are shown to the user.