Università degli Studi di Padova Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e la Cooperazione Internazionale Classe LM-38 Tesi di Laurea Upholstery Terminology: Creating an Italian-English Term Base Relatore Laureando Prof. Maria Teresa Musacchio Alice Nalesso n° matr.1184516 / LMLCC Anno Accademico 2019 / 2020 Ai miei nonni, per avermi insegnato la resilienza. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................. 5 1.1 An introduction to terminology .............................................................................. 5 1.2.1 The birth of terminology...................................................................................... 6 1.2.2 Terminology: an historical overview ................................................................... 7 1.3 Terminology: an independent discipline ................................................................ 8 1.4 Working methods in terminology ........................................................................... 9 1.5 The functions of terminology ............................................................................... 10 1.6 Different approaches in terminology .................................................................... 11 1.7 Organizational aspects of terminology ................................................................. 14 Chapter 2 ............................................................................................................... 17 2.1.1 Terminology and translation: two disciplines in connection ............................. 17 2.1.2 Terminology as a tool for translation ................................................................ 18 2.2 Specialized Translation and Language for Special Purposes ............................... 19 2.3 An introduction to Corpus Linguistics ........................................................... 21 2.3.1 An introduction to corpora ............................................................................ 22 2.3.2 Corpus based analysis .................................................................................... 25 Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................... 29 3.1 An introduction to upholstery ............................................................................... 29 3.2 The documentation stage ...................................................................................... 30 3.2.1 Background material...................................................................................... 31 3.2.1 The extraction corpus .................................................................................... 33 3.3 Term extraction stage ........................................................................................... 34 3.4 The terminological record: creation and compilation ........................................... 35 3.4.1 Data categories for terms and term-related information ................................ 36 3.4.2 Data categories related to concept description .............................................. 37 3.4.3 Administrative data categories ...................................................................... 38 Chapter 4 ............................................................................................................... 39 4.1 Term entries .......................................................................................................... 39 4.2 References .......................................................................................................... 117 4.3 Comment ............................................................................................................ 130 4.3.1 The concept system ..................................................................................... 130 4.3.2 The management of polysemy ..................................................................... 136 4.3.3 Loan words .................................................................................................. 138 4.3.4 The specificity of special languages ............................................................ 140 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 143 References ........................................................................................................... 145 Sitography ................................................................................................................. 146 RIASSUNTO IN ITALIANO ............................................................................. 161 Introduction The growing globalization and internationalization of recent years have increased the demand for translation and localization in order to meet the needs of commercial and social exchanges all over the world. The market of translation and interpreting industries is developing fast, generating huge amount of profits. Today more than ever, communication and interaction must be clear because they are involved in strategic fields such as politics, economics, and social life. Ambiguity cannot be tolerated as it could threaten important economic and political relations. In this scenario, terminology plays a crucial role in regulating communication to avoid misunderstandings between the parties involved in the exchange. In particular, specialized terminology organizes, standardizes and/or linguistically plans concepts of a specialized subject fields allowing communication and specialized translation. Specialized translation is not an easy task because the translator needs a deep knowledge of the special subject field and its terminology. Specialized languages are subcodes of the general language that are used by experts to communicate inside a specialized domain. Only by studying and analyzing the lexicon and the terminology, can the translator deliver the right message for the technical domain in question. This is why it is so important to have access to high quality terminology resources such as databases and glossaries in order to produce a high quality specialized translation. Having developed an interest for terminology and owing to its significant role in translation for special languages, I have decided to devote this work to the creation of a field-specific terminological data base. The choice of upholstery as subject field for the project was not accidental. I have decided to focus on this specific domain due to my familiar background in the discipline, as my grandfather has been an upholsterer for almost 70 years. Growing close to an artisanal business of such type, I was able to notice that Italian manufacturing goods, especially handmade furniture, are very much appreciated abroad. Made in Italy products are exported all over the world every day, and this causes the need for translation and localization in different languages of various type of materials such as product sheets, websites and brochures. 1 Despite the economic importance of upholstery terminology, it is still hard to find accessible and adequate resources for this specialized terminology. Especially because the majority of Italian companies working in furniture and upholstery are still family-run or small business and therefore do not have a standardized vocabulary. One of the purposes of this dissertation is to shed light on terminology as an essential practice in the language studies in order to produce quality translation. This work aims to contribute to the creation and spreading of good quality terminological resources that can be used from experts and translators to enhance their practice and build constructive knowledge. In order to do this, in Chapter One I will focus on the birth of terminology as a discipline and its struggle for acknowledgment in the scientific field. For long time, terminology has not been recognized as an independent discipline, and even in recent years some scholars believe that terminology is not to be considered a totally autonomous field. Then, this Chapter will describe the main working methods and different approaches that characterized this discipline throughout the years. Lastly, Chapter One will give an overview on the organizational aspects of the discipline and on how countries and agencies manage terminological work. Chapter Two will deal with the relationship between the two fields of terminology and translation and how terminological work can be an effective tool in the translation of specialized text. After this, I will describe briefly the features that characterize a Special Language, namely the importance of specific lexicon and terminology. The final part of Chapter Two will try to give a brief explanation of corpus linguistics and corpora as a tool for terminological activity. Thanks to corpus based analysis we can study great collections of texts belonging to a specialized field and extract terminological information from them. After this theoretic introduction, Chapter Three will focus on the background work for the terminological project. First, an overview of the field of Upholstery will be carried out, focusing on the history of upholstery from ancient time to today. After that, the second section of the third chapter will explain the documentation