Though concern with terminology can be traced back to the earliest semanticians, only in the twentieth century has a claim been made for terminology as an independent discipline. This claim rests on a dual foundation: the observation that an original theoretical framework has been developed to deal with the phenomena of designation in special languages, and the fact that in the field of communication terminology is considered a self-contained area of application.

This book denies the independent status of terminology as a discipline but affirms its value as a subject in almost every contemporary teaching programme. There is no substantial body of literature which could support the proclamation of terminology as a separate discipline and there is not likely to be. Everything of import that can be said about terminology is more appropriately said in the context of linguistics or information science or computational linguistics. We see terminology as a number of practices that have evolved around the creation of terms, their collection and explication and finally their presentation in various printed and electronic media. Practices, however wellestablished, do not constitute a discipline, but there is no denying a long history of methodologies which themselves require theoretical underpinnings to justify their distinctive nature. Disciplines establish knowledge about things and as such are justified in their own right; methodologies are only means to an end, in the case of terminology, how to do things. The need for a methodology of terminological data processing has grown largely in response to the information explosion which led to increased concern with appropriate designations for the many new concepts created, especially in science and technology, and to a strong interest in effective international communication. After being the exclusive domain of a few theoreticians and diverse subject specialists for many decades, terminological practice was