Terminology at legal framework context related to students’ entry to University: a research on UNILA and UNE

Abstract

in present paper, it is analysed, according to a terminological perspective, the vocabulary included at the University legal framework (ULF) of Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-America (UNILA) and Universidad Nacional del Este (UNE), related to students’ entry in these two institutions. Being based on Wüster (1998), Gouadec (1990), Cabré (1993) and Krieger e Finatto (2004), we analyse the matter through two points of view: a) national and monolinguistic; b) binational and bilinguistic. In the first case, two corpora of documents are obtained: one in Portuguese, formed by documents from ULF of UNILA and another one in Spanish, formed by documents from UNE; afterwards, terms are extracted and organized in terminological index cards; in the second case, are settled the equivalence relations between concepts from different ULFs, in order to adapt from source language into target language. As resulting objects from the research, were elaborated one terminological database and one bilingual glossary, both intended for helping students, teachers, administrative secretarial assistants (ASAs), professional translators and interpreters on reception and production of specialized texts in the context of University. We conclude that: a) students, when entering the University, have a pre-existing knowledge of Higher Education terminology that isn’t enough to properly understand ULF documents; b) both universities give priority hegemonic languages in their ULFs, drawing particularly attention to Paraguay situation, an officially bilingual Spanish-Guarani country, but UNE’s ULF is entirely in Spanish; c) ULF documents contains a lot of acronyms, not always supported by their explicit meaning, rendering the documents rather less easily comprehensible.