The Cultural Approach to Terminology and its Application to the Case of Persian

The cultural approach to terminology entails identification of the mechanisms available in a target language for handling novel scientific concepts borrowed from a source language. This objective is achieved by exploiting the cultural structures available in the target language to bridge native speakers’ previous knowledge to their perceptions of novel concepts. Looked at from this viewpoint, the cultural approach to terminology involves the development and exploitation of the tools already present in a target language to meet its speakers’ emerging conceptual needs. Introducing the basic concepts of the cultural approach, the present article initially reviews its theoretical foundations to set the grounds for making a linguistic distinction between Saussurean and cultural views of the signifier-signified relation. In a second stage, the study provides descriptions of reconceptualization in the target language, term variation, and term processing in scientific language. In the section on term selection and neologism, the morphological-semantic dimensions of term structure will be explored within the framework of the approach adopted and the role of metaphor will be highlighted both as a semantic shift process and as an aspect of syntagmatic term construction. Finally, in the section on data analysis, both native terms and those approved by the Academy of Persian Language & Literature selected from different areas will receive an in-depth analysis.