Technical Communication aims at systematising, structuring and making technical content about a given product or service available to a not necessarily specialist public. Despite their marketing goals, food labels perfectly fit in this definition.
The lack of – or reduced – understanding of the consumer, particularly regarding market available food items with health claims, has however raised questions about the function and effectiveness of the food label per se. As a consequence the creation of a termbase targeted at non-specialists, with the aim of making scientifically valid and accurate information on the so called functional food sistematically available has been proposed.
Resources within the field of Terminology typically have translators, technical writers, and/or – future – special subject field specialists as target public. The study underlying this presentation was developed under the hypothesis that termbases can be created, so as to make specialised data available to a public which may well not master it, neither conceptually, nor as discourse.
The mediating role of Terminology in the transmission and access to knowledge here considered raises, however, challenges with regard to the accuracy and validity of the information made available. In order to overcome these challenges, theoretical and methodological criteria were taken into account and adopted. The former are analysed and described in detail in Remígio, 2010, and Remígio, 2013; the latter will be depicted in this presentation.
The singular nature of this project lies in the fact that texts on functional food targeted at the consumer are not only written by researchers, professors or science communicators, but also by actors from the food industry and journalists, who produce texts according to given communicative intentions: if the target public is heterogeneous, so are the text producers.
Consequently and upon familiarization with the special subject field, the following question was raised: how to select and organise texts, and how to explore the corpus, so as to identify and extract terms candidates and potential definitions, and to meet the needs of the consumer?
In this presentation answers to the question above will be given and concluding remarks on the challenges of building a termbase to non-specialists will be presented.
References:
REMÍGIO, Ana Rita – Processo terminográfico: vertentes conceptual, comunicativa e textual. Proposta de uma base de dados terminológica para o consumidor. Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2010. 586 p. PhD Thesis.
REMÍGIO, Ana Rita – The terminographical process: phases and dimensions. META: Translator’s Journal. 58:1 (2013), pp. 191-211.