Standardization of English Navigation Terminology in Railway Traffic Domain

Abstract

The technical progress and the globalization accelerate rapidly the development of new disciplines and sub-disciplines. Consequently, new and specific terminology is necessary. In addition, the interdisciplinarity contributes as well to the development of communication problems between non-professionals and experts of a special domain or between experts of different domains—as well at international level. Usually, technical terms are defined differently according to their domains. Therefore, a new terminological approach will avoid semantic vagueness as synonymy, antonymy, risk of confusion, hypernymy-hyponymy relations and polysemy, homonymy, etc.. For example, the terms “localization” and “positioning” are prototypes for this semantic vagueness. The objective of the iglos (“intelligent glossary”) terminology work of the Institute of Traffic Safety and Automation Engineering of the Technische Universitat Braunschweig is to clarify the multilingual and multidisciplinary misunderstanding between special languages of different domains by standardizing the definitions of technical terms. The focus of this paper lies on semantic problems of English navigation terminology in railway traffic domain and the clarification of the semantic vagueness between its terms with a modeling process and a linguistic method with different criteria. Finally, the result of these approaches should be a consistent navigation terminology in the railway domain.