Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

67appears and then skims texts in the other language to find a parallel context in which theequivalent occurs. This procedure works well for terms denoting objects or products,whereas the following procedure can be used for more abstract terms.According to the authors, the fifth procedure is the only alternative available tolexicographers of culture-dependent LSP dictionaries, one that applies particularly tolegal language. It consists in searching the thematic context as in the fourth procedure,but in addition to his or her linguistic competence, the lexicographer will have to drawon his or her encyclopaedic knowledge. The authors stress that it is of paramountimportance to ensure that the LSP corpus contains the same typology of L1 and L2texts. For instance, guesses on equivalents can be verified by looking at the introductoryor concluding parts of texts if the lemmata typically occur there. The authors are awarethat none of these procedures can successfully help the lexicographer find equivalents inall cases.In terminology, this kind of work has traditionally followed an onomasiologicalapproach, one that takes the concept as the point of departure. As a concept can only beunderstood in the context of the system to which it belongs, it is first necessary todiscover the system of concepts. Therefore, classic terminologists will most oftenfollow the approach described in Felber (1987) and in Arnzt (1993), i.e. unilingualsystems of concepts are compiled separately so that there is no source-language targetlanguagerelationship and only then are the two systems compared. The task ends whenthe definitions of concepts are compared in the two languages.The comparison should reveal if the conceptual systems differ from onelanguage to the other as well as the extent to which they differ. As concepts do notalways match up from one language to the other, Felber (1987) admits that eachconceptual system will have its own structure in each of the languages considered.