Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: a Corpus-Based Study

In scientific and technical communication, multiword terms are the most frequent type of lexical units. Rendering them in another language is not an easy task due to their cognitive complexity, the proliferation of different forms, and their unsystematic representation in terminographic resources. This often results in a broad spectrum of translations for multiword terms, which also foment term variation since they consist of two or more constituents. In this study we carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Spanish translation variants of a set of environment-related concepts by evaluating equivalents in three parallel corpora, two comparable corpora and two terminological resources. Our results showed that MWTs exhibit a significant degree of term variation of different characteristics, which were used to establish a set of criteria according to which term variants should be selected, organized and described in terminological knowledge bases.