Searching for patterns in the transfer of multiword units: a corpus-based contrastive study on secondary term formation

The dominance of English in specialised communication is currently emphasizing the importance of secondary term formation. In this respect, studying the way English multiword terms are transposed into other languages becomes of great interest. This paper reports on a corpus-based contrastive study that describes how multiword terms are formed in English and transferred into Spanish in the field of remote sensing of forest fires. The study particularly focuses on identifying patterns among these units and their language equivalents. The results reveal the existence of certain regularities which could be useful when transferring other multiword terms, but also report on the great structural diversity of the equivalents found for each source-language term.

Jaar van publicatie:2012

Trefwoorden:secondary term formation, multiword terms, corpus-based study, transferring procedures