LINGUIST List 23.149
Mon Jan 09 2012
Diss: General Ling: Kwiatek: 'Contrastive Analysis of English and ...'
Editor for this issue: Xiyan Wang
<xiyanlinguistlist.org>
Date: 06-Jan-2012
From: Ewelina Kwiatek <evelyn.kwiatek
gmail.com>
Subject: Contrastive Analysis of English and Polish Surveying Terminology
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Institution: Swansea University
Program: Translation
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2011
Author: Ewelina Anna Kwiatek
Dissertation Title: Contrastive Analysis of English and Polish Surveying Terminology
Linguistic Field(s):
Lexicography
Morphology
Semantics
Text/Corpus Linguistics
Translation
Subject Language(s):
English (eng)
Polish (pol)
Dissertation Director:
Alison Williams
Pius Ten Hacken
Dissertation Abstract:
Terminology as a scientific field is still a relatively under-researchedarea. There are few research projects based on actual and systematic datacompiled in the termbases. Consequently, little is known about the natureof problems in bilingual terminologies. The scope of subjects that arefairly well represented in terminological analyses of many languages istypically limited to law and medicine, whereas little attention has beenpaid to such fields as surveying.
The research examines how surveying terms and concepts differ in Englishand Polish with respect to three subfields of surveying: geodeticsurveying, cartography and GPS. The data for this investigation comes fromthe two monolingual termbases with translation equivalents which werecompiled of surveying corpora designed for the purpose of this study. Thefirst part of the analysis is concerned with the study of terms, inparticular how they were formed and how they got named. The second part ofthe research project provides a comparison of concept systems with respectto surveying terminology. It examines how concepts were formed and in whatcircumstances new concepts were introduced. The main points of interestwere cases where concepts did not match, i.e. where there was no one-to-onecorrespondence between the terms in the two languages.
The study of terms revealed that many tendencies in word formation arecommon for English and Polish as derivation and compounding are the mostfrequent word formation processes in the two languages. English surveyingterminology has many abbreviations, whereas Polish borrows many terms fromEnglish, particularly in the field of GPS. The analysis of conceptsunveiled that there are many conceptual mismatches in geodetic surveyingand cartography, which confirms that the way in which humans organize theirwork and the way in which they perceive and classify the world isculture-dependant.
Page Updated: 09-Jan-2012