Aspects of intra- and interlingual terminological variation in specialized language units

Taking the cue from the definition of term variant as “an utterance which is semantically and conceptually related to an original term” (Daille et al, 1996), recent works have studied the types of and causes for terminological variation, and have contributed to defining the dynamics in term evolution or “terminological growth” (Kageura 2002) and to describing the conceptual patterns of term formation. Close observation of terms in their context also points out that specialized terminological data can be better represented by a network of conceptual and/or semantic relations. As regards the types, the perspective has widened beyond the original term, favouring a focus on a core of variation types based on semantic/conceptual relations such as, for instance, inflectional, syntactic, morphological, paradigmatic variations. As to the causes, it seems they can be related to variables such as different communicative registers, stylistic/expressive issues, interlinguistic influences and, at a different level of complexity, different conceptualizations. The article discusses aspects of intra- and interlingual variation at the terminological and translation level.