ABSTRACT
Discourses of environmental protection and conservation have evolved concepts that are transnationally disseminated to be locally appropriated, transformed, and, at times, contested. International organizations, such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), play a major role in the circulation of these discourses, as they produce and support publications that aim at promoting, regulating, and reporting on international conservation efforts. As part of their language policy, international organizations commission translations to provide content accessibility to member institutions, envisaging local adoption of guidelines towards shared international environmental protection goals. Local organizations, in turn, seek to accommodate international discourses within their institutions, which implicates construing meanings within their own context of culture in response to both international and local environmental concerns. This process can be observed by examining domain-specific terminology and the intricate network of interrelations concepts enter. This chapter proposes an approach to terminology through ontologies of concepts and their intrinsic relations in different contexts to enable mapping such contexts in an attempt to establish equivalence between concepts and the terms naming them. The study reported on focuses on the nomenclature established in IUCN’s guidelines for protected areas and its translation into Brazilian Portuguese. Meanings construed internationally and their renditions by local institutions are approached as indices of negotiation and adaptation within the scope of local policy making, yielding variation in both source and target texts. A systemic-functional approach to language is taken to model the (meta)context in institutional translation and ontologies are proposed as a form of organizing domain terminology for assisting translation and multilingual text production.
