Intralinguistic Variation in Comparable Corpora of Brazilian and European Portuguese in the Terminology of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

• Main Authors: Manoel Messias Alves da Silva, Maria Teresa Rijo da Fonseca Lino, Juan Felipe Zuluaga Molina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad del Valle 2020-07-01
• Series: Lenguaje
• Subjects: contrastive linguistics; communicative theory of terminology; terminology; terminological variation
• Online Access: https://revistalenguaje.univalle.edu.co/index.php/lenguaje/article/view/9393/12622

This article aims at showing the intralinguistic terminological variation in comparable corpora of Brazilian and European Portuguese identified in the post-doctoral internship project Terminological dictionary of nanoscience and nanotechnology: Integration between Brazilian and European Portuguese. Since the 1980s, the phenomenon of variation in Terminology has experienced a renewed interest when re-evaluations of the General Theory of Terminology enabled the recognition that the Unit of Specialized Knowledge comes from natural language and that, as such, it has all kinds of peculiarities. The matter of intralinguistic integration arises from the constitution of a corpus of the two variants aiming at assessing the most suitable possibilities for this purpose, according to pre-established criteria and by common consent with specialists. It is possible to assert that this diversity results from the different conceptions that exist both in the field of knowledge at hand, given its own complex conceptual structure, and in the different sub-fields which compose it, not to mention the role played by the variety of practices linked to any field of knowledge, the diversity of its users and organizations that resource to specialized language. Furthermore, the paper offers an overview of nanoscience / nanotechnology and theories about the phenomenon of variation in Terminology, along with examples of terminological variations in this field of knowledge.