Technical Terminology in Asian Languages: Different Approaches to Adopting Engineering Terms

Terminology development in education, science and technology is a key to formulating a knowledge society. The authors are developing a multilingual engineering terminology dictionary consisting of more than ten thousand engineering terms each for ten Asian languages and English. The dictionary is primarily designed to support foreign students who are studying engineering subjects at Japanese higher educational institutions in the Japanese language. Analysis of the lexical terms could provide useful knowledge for language resource creators. There are two adoption approaches, “phonetic adoption” (transliteration of borrowed terms) and “semantic adoption” (where the meaning is expressed using native words). The proportion of the two options found in the terminology set of each country (or language) shows a substantial difference and seems to reflecti language policies of the country and the influence of foreign languages on the host language. This paper presents preliminary results of our investigation on this question based on a comparative study of three languages: Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai.