FIT Terminology Management & Research 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A translator is working on a medical device manual and notices the client uses both 'tubing' and 'catheter' interchangeably. What is the correct terminological action?
- Keep both terms as synonyms throughout the translation
- Flag the inconsistency and ask the client to designate one preferred term (Correct answer)
- Choose whichever term appears more frequently and apply it everywhere
- Delete one term from the source text without informing the client
Correct answer: Flag the inconsistency and ask the client to designate one preferred term
In specialized translation, ambiguous synonym usage should be clarified with the client to establish a preferred term before translation proceeds.
Question 2: Which element of a concept system best describes the relationship between 'vehicle,' 'car,' and 'sedan'?
- Partitive relationship
- Generic-specific (hierarchical) relationship (Correct answer)
- Causal relationship
- Sequential relationship
Correct answer: Generic-specific (hierarchical) relationship
Vehicle → car → sedan represents a hierarchy where each lower level is a specific subtype of the concept above it.
Question 3: TBX (TermBase eXchange) is significant in terminology management because it:
- Is a proprietary format owned by a single software vendor
- Provides an open, standardized XML format for exchanging termbase data between systems (Correct answer)
- Only supports English-language terminology databases
- Replaces the need for human terminologists
Correct answer: Provides an open, standardized XML format for exchanging termbase data between systems
TBX is an ISO-standardized open XML format that enables interoperability of termbase data across different tools and platforms.
Question 4: When conducting secondary terminological research, a translator would consult:
- A domain expert in a live interview
- Existing dictionaries, glossaries, and reference works already compiled by others (Correct answer)
- Raw corpora with no annotation
- The source text author directly
Correct answer: Existing dictionaries, glossaries, and reference works already compiled by others
Secondary research draws on already-compiled resources like dictionaries and glossaries, as opposed to primary research that involves direct expert consultation or corpus creation.
Question 5: What does the concept of 'term equivalence' acknowledge in multilingual terminology work?
- Every source-language term has a perfect one-to-one match in the target language
- Conceptual, formal, and functional correspondence between terms may be partial or approximate across languages (Correct answer)
- Terms in different languages always have identical definitions
- Equivalence only applies to legal terminology
Correct answer: Conceptual, formal, and functional correspondence between terms may be partial or approximate across languages
True one-to-one term equivalence is rare; translators must assess the degree of conceptual and functional overlap between terms in different languages.
Question 6: Which type of context sentence is MOST valuable for a termbase entry intended to help translators?
- A sentence that uses the term but provides no definitional clues
- A sentence drawn from an authentic source text that illustrates typical usage and collocations (Correct answer)
- A sentence invented by the terminologist to sound natural
- A sentence in the target language only
Correct answer: A sentence drawn from an authentic source text that illustrates typical usage and collocations
Authentic context sentences from real texts show how a term behaves in actual usage, including collocations and syntactic patterns that aid translation decisions.
Question 7: In terminology management, 'term extraction' software assists translators by:
- Automatically translating all specialized terms without human review
- Identifying candidate terms in a text that may require terminological attention (Correct answer)
- Deleting duplicate entries from a termbase
- Converting glossaries from PDF to Excel format
Correct answer: Identifying candidate terms in a text that may require terminological attention
Term extraction tools flag statistically frequent or linguistically significant noun phrases as candidates for terminological treatment, which a human terminologist then validates.
FIT Terminology Management & Research 3
A translator is working on a medical device manual and notices the client uses both 'tubing' and 'catheter' interchangeably.
What is the correct terminological action?