Chapter 22

Terminology and equivalence

Equivalence has not attracted as much interest as other issues in Terminology. Nevertheless, terminological equivalence can be understood from different perspectives: (1) equivalence at the concept, term or textual level; (2) degree of equivalence (from full to zero equivalence); (3) interlinguistic or intralinguistic equivalence; (4) equivalence based on the syntactic structure of terminological correspondences; (5) equivalence depending on the solution found for each equivalence-related problem; or (6) discovered or created equivalence. This chapter addresses equivalence from different theoretical approaches and their impact on the practice of terminography by analyzing different equivalence-related problems, terminographic methods and products.