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creating a totally independent discipline. This goal led
terminologists to go to great lengths to emphasize differences
between the two even to the extent of affirming that terms are not
words.
In a parallel way, linguistic theory has largely ignored
terminology, probably because specialized language has been and
is often regarded as merely a special case of general language.
Thus, it was not considered as worthy of serious study because
anything pertaining to general language was also presumed to be
true of specialized language.
However, interesting conclusions about specialized
language, scientific translation, and language in general can be
obtained when terminology is studied in its own right. As such, it
is most certainly susceptible to linguistic analysis within the
framework of a linguistic model. Oddly enough, some years ago
this seemingly innocuous affirmation would have caused quite a
hue and cry in terminological circles. The reason for this was that
the first approximations to terminology had normalization as a
primary objective. Great pains were taken to strive for totally
unambiguous communication through standardization. This
signified univocity or one-to-one reference between term and
concept. The fact that the majority of terms designate concepts that
represent objects in a specialized knowledge field meant that such
an objective seemed possible to achieve. Nevertheless, it soon
became apparent that this was more a desideratum than a reality.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century a discussion took
place on the question whether terminology science should be
considered as a linguistic discipline. A significant number of
linguists and some terminologists deem that terminology science
lies entirely within modern linguistics, as terminology’s subject are
lexical units of a natural language.
However, firstly, terminology science deals not only with
terms (as a class of lexical units of languages for specific
purposes) but with terminology systems as well (which is not

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