ABSTRACT
Terminology is concerned with the naming of concepts in specialized domains of knowledge. This field has developed rapidly since the middle of the twentieth century, but there has been an ongoing debate as to whether terminology can truly be considered a discipline. While some commentators (e.g. Jaekel 2000; Sprung 2000a) consider terminology to be a discipline in its own right, others, such as Sager (1990), argue that it still has some way to go in order to achieve this status. Although Sager affirms the value of terminology as a subject worthy of study, he rejects the claim that it is an independent discipline, viewing it instead as a number of practices, based on methodologies, that deal with the creation, collection, explication and presentation of terms. According to Sager, disciplines establish knowledge about things, whereas methodologies, which focus on how to do things, are only a means to an end. Scholars such as Sager argue that everything of importance that can be said about terminology is more appropriately said in the context of other disciplines, such as linguistics, information science or computational linguistics. Whether or not it is considered an independent discipline, terminology clearly has very close ties to other areas of applied linguistics, including specialized translation, and while terminological investigations can certainly be carried out in a monolingual setting, one of its most widely practised applications is in the domain of translation.
