EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base concerning the environment. It is the practical application of Frame-based Terminology, a cognitive approach to the representation of specialized knowledge. Recent enhancements include the EcoLexicon English corpus, a phraseological module, and a flexible approach to terminological definitions.

In English, the international language of communication (Tono in Lexicography 1(1):1–5, 2014 ), complex nominals (CNs) are frequently used to convey specialized concepts (Sager et al. in English special languages. Principles and practice in science and technology. Brandstetter Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1980 ; Nakov in Natural Language Engineering 19(03):291–330, 2013 ). These phraseological units have a nominal head that is modified by another element (e.g., hydropower production). Problems can arise in relation to their identification, their bracketing or internal structure disambiguation, their meaning access, and their translation or production in another language. Although they are not marginal phenomena in specialized language, they are rarely included in specialized resources. Even when they are included, their treatment is not systematic (Cabezas-García and Faber in Computational and corpus-based phraseology. Springer, Cham, pp 145–159, 2017a ). This article describes the representation of CNs in EcoLexicon ( http://www.ecolexicon.ugr.es ), a terminological knowledge base, whose new phraseological module will include verb collocations (e.g., a volcano spews lava) as well as CNs. For that purpose, we used a wind power corpus in English and Spanish for term extraction, semantic analysis, establishment of interlinguistic correspondences, and definition crafting. We propose different access points to information (Kwary in International Journal of Lexicography 25(1):30–49, 2012 ), such as the CNs formed from a given term, a bilingual view in English and Spanish, or the syntactic–semantic combinations in CNs. The structure of the CN module is based on the semantics of these phraseological units, which facilitates the specification of mapping rules as well as knowledge acquisition (Faber in A cognitive linguistics view of terminology and specialized language. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2012 ).

Understanding specialized discourse requires the identification and activation of knowledge structures underlying the text. The expansion and enhancement of knowledge is thus an important part of the specialized translation process (Faber 2015). This paper explores how the analysis of terminological meaning can be addressed from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (FBT) (Faber 2012, 2015), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In this study, context expansion was explored in a three-stage procedure: from single terms to multi-word terms, from multi-word terms to phrases, and from phrases to frames. Our results showed that this approach provides valuable insights into the identification of the knowledge structures underlying specialized texts.

Despite its importance, environmental law has largely been ignored in environmental knowledge bases. This may be due to the fact that legal issues may not, strictly speaking, be considered scientific knowledge in environmental knowledge resources, which may in turn relate to the complexity of reflecting the cultural component (which includes different legal systems) in the description of terms and concepts. The terminological knowledge base EcoLexicon has recently begun to include information on environmental law. This paper takes the methodological perspective of frame-based terminology to analyze typical verb collocations in environmental law that will be added to the phraseology module of EcoLexicon. Corpus analysis was used to compare the behavior of verbs collocating with pollution in environmental science and environmental law. Verbs were classified based on lexical domains and semantic classes through definition factorization, as described in the Lexical Grammar Model. The differences were mostly based on the specificity of the arguments and the emphasis on the polluter in environmental law. This resulted in a proposal for the inclusion and configuration of environmental law phraseology in EcoLexicon, showing sociocultural differences across environmental subdomains.

The quality of a specialized translation depends to a great extent on the treatment of multiword terms (MWTs). Since MWTs are not always adequately described or even included in most terminological resources, translators and terminologists must find other ways to deal with them. One method involves the analysis of parallel texts. Traditionally, parallel texts have been a valuable resource for terminology extraction and knowledge acquisition. They can be compiled as comparable corpora (i.e. collections of texts originally written in the source and target languages). Nevertheless, even though comparable corpora can facilitate translation, many translators are often unfamiliar with corpus query techniques. This paper describes a method that identifies Spanish equivalents of English MWTs in corpora, and also provides translators and terminologists with a set of manual corpus query techniques that help to effectively translate MWTs. The comparable corpus compiled was composed of original English and Spanish texts on wind energy generation. The method proposed is based on distributional semantics and was used to identify and compare contextual elements of the concepts in both languages. The results of our study showed that this procedure simplifies and contributes to the accurate identification of MWT translation equivalents in corpora.