Terminographies

Terminography is the discipline that studies, documents, and manages specialized vocabularies within a domain. Terminographies are the products and repositories produced by this practice, including term dictionaries, glossaries, thesauri, term banks, and related databases that capture terms, their definitions, usage notes, and cross-language equivalents. The aim is to achieve precision, consistency, and interoperability in technical and professional communication.

The scope of terminography covers the creation, organization, and maintenance of terms for specific fields such as medicine, engineering, law, information technology, and the natural sciences. Key outputs include concept-based term systems, multilingual term entries, and controlled vocabularies. Terminographies may be monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, and they often integrate with larger knowledge organization efforts like ontologies and thesauri. They also support translation, localization, and compliance with industry standards.

Methods and practices in terminography combine linguistic analysis with domain expertise. Core activities include term extraction from corpora and expert input, sense delimitation and definition authoring, usage notes, and cross-referencing. Terms are positioned within concept structures that show hierarchical (broader/narrower) and associative relationships. Verification, validation with domain specialists, and versioning are important to keep terminologies current. Modern terminographies frequently utilize terminology management systems and interoperable formats to facilitate sharing, reuse, and alignment with databases, search systems, and machine-readable knowledge graphs.

Applications and impact include improved technical writing, standardized documentation, and enhanced translation and information retrieval. Terminographies support knowledge management, regulatory compliance, and interoperability across sectors. Professionals in this field must balance linguistic clarity with domain accuracy, rapidly evolving terminology, and multilingual mapping to serve diverse user communities. Standards and best practices from organizations such as ISO guide systematic terminology work and the construction of reliable term bases.