La terminografia orientata alla traduzione tra pragmatismo e armonizzazione

The articles focuses on one of the fundamental choices to be made prior to the creation of a translation-oriented terminological data bank, namely, its position between absolute prescription and absolute description in order to find the right balance between pragmatics and harmonisation. Both the traditional outlook on terminology, which emphasises the importance of standardisation, and some recent approaches , that lay stress on single texts, are unsuitable. The most promising solution seems to be an intermediate one, based on the analysis of a significant corpus of texts in order to determine the privileged characteristics and other prototypical factors: on the one hand, the importance for the specialised translator to obtain the pragmatic equivalent even on a terminological level, on the other, the contribution the translator can make towards harmonisation of terminology. The latter does not imply a prescriptive approach, but entails paying greater attention to the self-regulating attempts (either conscious or unconscious) of specialists.