Coinage and Application of Metaphoric Terms in Scientific and Technical Texts: Contrastive Approach
Translation and Comprehensibility 2015
Larisa Iļinska, Marina Platonova, Tatjana Smirnova

The growing significance of innovation and technical progress determines the central role of scientific and technical texts in information exchange and knowledge transfer. A contemporary special text is characterised by a growing degree of hybridity caused by increasing volume of interdisciplinary research. The changing nature of the special text has had a considerable impact on the patterns of term coinage as well as interlingual alignment of terms. One of the most frequently used patterns of term formation is meaning extension based on metaphor, metonymy and allusion. Metaphorisation as an essential process of human cognitive activity is coming into focus of study of contemporary terminologists. Temmerman argues that “terminology can no longer ignore that the importance of metaphor in categorisation has become a central issue in the cognitive sciences” (Temmerman, 2000: 182). Thus, the research on the issues of communication, both intralingual and interlingual, should be performed taking into consideration both linguistic and cognitive theories. Cognitive theories are vital in understanding how mental representations of the concepts are formed in the process of comprehension of a special text. While translating contemporary LSP (language for special purposes) texts, apart from profound knowledge of the subject field, a translator should possess a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic competences, such as semantic, pragmatic, social, cultural and metaphorical. The latter competence defined as the knowledge of the conceptual system of a language, the awareness of the relationships existing among the concepts, meanings and their manifestations in the language, has recently been widely discussed by linguists and translators. Lack of metaphorical competence, inability to understand the links among symbols and images within conceptual systems of the source and target languages may block comprehension and lead to the production of inadequate, non-equivalent texts in translation, i.e. the texts that do not meet the needs and expectations of the readers in particular communicative situations. Modern terms based on metaphoric meaning extension do not meet the requirements set for ideal terms, as such terms are not monosemous, do not denote clear-cut concepts placed in the concept system, are not studied from the onomosiological perspective, and are not investigated synchronically (see Platonova 2013: 156-159 for discussion). Therefore, modern terms may potentially pose translation challenges, such as lack of referential equivalence, differences in conceptual systems of the source and target languages, intradisciplinary polysemy, culture-specific allusions embodied in the meaning of a term, and impossibility to transfer the metaphoric component of meaning of the term into the target language. The aim of the present study is to analyse formation patterns of the terms created by meaning extension used in various scientific and technical fields, and to investigate the methods how these terms can be aligned across the working languages, namely, English, Latvian and Russian, with a minimal loss of essential components of meaning. The terms under consideration are studied in contrastive perspective using the methods of lexico-semantic and pragmatic analyses with regard to the issues of maintaining comprehensibility in translation of LSP texts.


Atslēgas vārdi
metaphoric terms, scientific and technical texts, term alignment

Iļinska, L., Platonova, M., Smirnova, T. Coinage and Application of Metaphoric Terms in Scientific and Technical Texts: Contrastive Approach. No: Translation and Comprehensibility. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2015, 139.-162.lpp. ISBN 978-3-7329-0022-0.

Publikācijas valoda
English (en)
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