Using Concept Mapping and the Web as Corpus to Develop Terminological Competence among Translators and Interpreters

“Übersetzen ist die Verwendung des Verstandenen,” wrote the late Hans Vermeer in 1986. Seen within the context of Vermeer’s Skopos theory, translation is at its core a dual process of understanding and applying this understanding in the production of a target text. I intend to discuss the essence of Vermeer’s quote against the background of specialized translation and interpreting. In particular, I will be focusing on the two main aspects of translation highlighted in the quote, the cognitive dimension of translation as information processing on the one hand and the pragmatic dimension of the purposeful application of that information in the transfer and production phases of the translation process on the other hand. At the heart of my paper lies a didactic model for the development of information processing and information application competence in the university training of future translators and interpreters. The main focus of the discussion will be on terminology in general and, following Teresa Cabré’s “theory of doors,” on the cognitive and pragmatic dimensions of terminological units in particular. The objective is to combine terminological (concept-oriented) approaches with textographical (corpus-driven) ones, so as to show, first, how terminological units can be organized in mono and multilingual knowledge structures and, second, how, based on a digital corpus search, these units can be implemented into the norm-guided production of the target text.