Terminology in Translation. Study of the IATE Term Database for Term Translation in the Domain of Life Cycle Assessment Applied to Waste Management

Abstract

Circular economy (CE) has been of great interest in recent years and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is frequently used to analyze the product life cycle from cradle-to-grave. Additionally, LCA can be applied to Waste Management, as waste poses a growing problem. The European Union produces a variety of texts on this subject which are translated to languages used within the EU. However, as these domains were developed recently, relevant terminology may not be included in the European Union’s term database: IATE. The main objective of this study is to investigate to which extent IATE is suitable for the translation of terminology used in English source texts to Dutch within the domain of Life Cycle Assessment applied to Waste Management. The source text that will be discussed in this study is part of Sustainable Solid Waste Collection and Management by Pires, Martinho, Rodrigues, & Gomes (2018b). In this study, the automatic term extraction tool TermoStat by Drouin (2003) is used. Subsequently, the output will be evaluated using the annotation scheme developed by Rigouts Terryn (2017). The resulting list of terms will be cross-referenced with the IATE database. The source text contains 185 terms of which 102 are included in the IATE database. However, 83 terms are not (or not sufficiently) represented. Thus, when translating texts from these domains, translators cannot depend on the IATE database, meaning that the translation process is slowed down, because Dutch term equivalents must be obtained from other resources. Term fiches are proposed for 21 terms that are not represented in IATE. Though the interest in CE and LCA has increased considerably, the IATE database is not adapted for the translation of texts which fall under these domains. Consequently, the database should be expanded to include terms so academic and institutional knowledge on these topics can be made available for a larger audience using translation.