terminográfia

Terminography, or terminográfia in Hungarian, is the discipline concerned with the systematic development, organization, and maintenance of terminologies used in specialized domains. It combines linguistic analysis with subject-matter expertise to produce terms that are precise, unambiguous, and usable across languages and contexts.

The field encompasses the creation of controlled vocabularies, term banks, glossaries, dictionaries, and thesauri. Key activities include term extraction and analysis from domain texts, definition writing, sense disambiguation, and the selection of preferred terms while capturing synonyms and variants. Terminography also involves structuring terminologies as concept systems with relationships such as broader term, narrower term, and related term, as well as documenting these items with metadata to support retrieval, translation, and software processing. Multilingual and cross-domain alignment are common goals, often requiring collaboration with subject-matter experts and translators.

Standards and methods from terminography guide standardization, harmonization, and quality control. Notable influences include ISO standards on terminology work and knowledge organization, as well as frameworks for thesauri and concept systems. Technology plays a central role through terminology management systems, term bases, and data formats such as TBX and SKOS, enabling storage, maintenance, and interoperability with other linguistic or knowledge-organization resources.

Applications span science, engineering, healthcare, law, publishing, and public administration, where consistent terminology supports accurate communication, information retrieval, documentation, and multilingual translation. Challenges include handling polysemy and synonymy, keeping terms up to date, and aligning terminologies across languages and domains. The field is evolving with advances in natural language processing and linked data, which promise to enhance term extraction, integration, and reuse.