engleski

Multilingual Terminology in Social Sciences and Humanities

In the global multilingual scientific community, “small” languages like Croatian are incessantly swamped by terminology in foreign languages, predominantly in English as the lingua franca of choice. This creates a multilingual environment on the level of individual “small” language communities. However, on the global level it contributes to the linguistic homogenisation of scholarly discourse. The first formally organised, systematic, state-level terminology translation project in Croatia has recently started. This paper focuses on the part of the project relating to anthropological terminology. More specifically, it is concerned with issues encountered in translating terminology in cultural anthropology from English into Croatian. Examples from our work on the project will be given to illustrate each of the issues described. Several problems arise in organising and translating terminology in the social sciences and humanities. They stem partly from the key role assigned to language in these fields during the past half a century, as well as from the nature of SSH scholarship. The same term is frequently assigned different meanings, depending on the theoretical or ideological perspective, level or aspect of analysis of the designated phenomenon. Also, since discourse is always situated, terms created in a certain cultural, political, etc. context can appear foreign or even meaningless in a radically different context. This is further complicated by numerous terms taken from everyday, non-scientific language and thus bearing additional subtle stylistic and connotative layers. Translating terminology in the humanities and social sciences is thus shown to be a highly challenging, if not ultimately impossible enterprise. It is however an essential endeavour, especially in an interdisciplinary field such as anthropology, which is also relatively new to Croatian scholarship.

multilingualism; terminology; anthropology

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