Terminology in the era of globalisation
Terminology in the era of globalisation

Summary/Abstract: The importance of terminology in the era of globalisation stems from the fact that nowadays the rapid growth of scientific and technological knowledge is practically impossible without paying attention to the state of terminology. Special lexical units comprise more than 90 percent of the new words in modern langtrages. The growth of scientific and technical vocabularies is much faster than that of the everyday speech vocabulary, so at present the number of terms in some sciences (for e,rample chemistry or biology) exceeds the number of common words. We can compare the following figures: the full, unabridged version of the Webster's dictionary contains about 700,000 English words; the largest Russian 17-volume dictionary treats some 120,000 words (though already there are dictionaries containing ca. 200,000 words); at the same time Russian construction terminology numbers more than 150,000 words, modern biological terminology exceeds a million names for varieties of living beings, in chemistry we know more than 1,5 million substances. In industry already at the beginning of the 1980s more than 20 million types of various products were manufactured, each of them having its own special name.

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