6. Zusammenfassung und Ausblick
6.2 Summary
This dissertation German and Czech Logistics Terminology may be understood as a contribution to the linguistic analysis of German and Czech logistics terminology system.
Logistics as a complex of all technical and organizational activities used for planning operations which are connected with material flow is distinguished by its great boom since the end of the World War II. We could hardly find a branch of national economy which would be able to exist without it. Its importance is pivotal for business economics too, because logistics includes not only material flow but also information flow among all the objects and manages various time procedures in industry and in trade. It is a relatively broad field including findings and terminology of many particular branches e.g. transport, material handling, storage, packaging, documentation, information and employment. This work has been focused on these fields during the excerption of terms: 1. material flow, 2. powered industrial trucks, 3. transportation, palletization and containerization.
This dissertation consists essentially of two parts, one of them is being theoretical and the other one practical. The theoretical part, which is meant as an introduction, discusses the fundamental questions concerning to language for special purposes (hereafter LSP). First of all, the individual concepts of LSP are discussed from the point of view of researchers from German speaking countries. These investigations are extended by a horizontal classification of LSP which is meant as a co-existence of (theoretically) unlimited quantity of separate scientific disciplines. The other point of view is the vertical classification of LSP according to the theory of Heinz Ischreyt from the early 1960s and a later classification of German linguist Lothar Hoffmann. Furthermore, the question is being asked, to what extent LSP and its vocabulary are connected with each other and the results of these remarks are applied to logistics that is defined and its position among other scientific disciplines is specified.
These investigations are completed with some remarks on terminology and terminology science. After the opening explication of this term, the situation of the terminology research in German speaking countries and in the Czech Republic is mentioned. Scientific findings in both languages are used for creating generally binding documents in national and international normalization, standardization and unification and, of course, for lexicography work whose results in logistics are summarized. An essential part in this chapter presents the methodic article about relations among the terms from the point of view of Gerhard Rahmstorf, Austrian researchers Helmut Felber and Gerhard Budin, two representatives of the Vienna school of terminology and Gengfu Zhou, a Chinese linguist whose classification of
semantic relations in automotive engineering terminology is adopted and used for the distribution of the logistics terminology.
Considering this fact, comparing German and Czech logistics terminology is also the objective of the practical part of this dissertation. It continues the previous investigations doing a short treatise on translating of LSP and terminology. Some basic aspects the translator of technical texts is still confronted with are noticed: competence in the field of his activity, competence of LSP and terminology, culturally-specific and individual influences. The equivalence of terms whose survey is mentioned is also taken into account. At the end of this chapter, some remarks on computer-aided terminology systems are mentioned.
The practical part of this work is devoted to the analysis of logistics terminology; the extraordinary attention is paid to semantic relations, especially to the part-whole relation. This method used in early 1990s by Zhou for creating of German and Chinese data bank of automotive engineering has shown a huge determination in logistics terminology realized by semantic indications in part-whole relations. These are: classification, composition, enumeration, form, function, material, proportion, numbering and position. The characteristic of terminology is preceded by quantitative analysis of logistics terms and its distribution to five topics: 1. material flow, 2. transportation, packaging, unit load, 3. palletization and containerization, 4. storage systems, 5. powered industrial trucks.
From the total number of more than 1.000 lexical units, there were about 300 words analyzed in detail which were distributed in 64 schemes with a common semantic indication.
In doing so, the indication of form which is dominant in the whole lexical spectrum was established. This indication was represented 20times in total, which means 31%. This information refers to the fact that the variety of forms, which represents the variety of machines and equipment types, is very important in technical sciences. This diversity of forms is of a great importance for building of terms. The indication of enumeration (about 22%) and classification (about 16%) were noticeably less represented. On the contrary, the indications of numbering and function were represented only once which is a proof of their marginal importance.
On one hand, the contrastive analysis of German and Czech logistics terminology is a continuation of the previous part of this dissertation but on the other hand, it is also its completion. Its structure is different, it is based on theoretical findings described in the chapter on translating of technical texts and terminology and it sets the aim of identification and description of semantic differences between German and Czech terminology. It takes into
account the different ways of building of terms, the attention is paid to which ways are the Czech equivalents built replying to the German compound nouns.
The comparison of both languages verifies the opinion of Brigitte Horn-Helf, a German translatologist, who claims that the terminology is not translated even in case of more complicated noun phrases, but substituted in the target language. However, there are some exceptions in the terminology - the terms are due to absence of Czech expressions translated from the source language. In this way, some metaphorical and metonymical translated terms are formed, which are not successful. Based on this word material, it is demonstrated, there is, from the point of view of semantic, incongruence in some cases of noun phrases among the particular components of the lexical unit; some of these components are not compatible in source and target language. The reason is, some sememes of the particular components are represented in the source language, but they fail in the target language. The adequacy of these terms is getting weaker or can be disputed.
From the point of view of word-building, there are two marked differences between German and Czech logistics terminology: on one hand, it is discordance in the number of particular components of the term, on the other hand, there are some differences of types of word-building. If the term consists of more particular components in the source language than its equivalent in the target language, the lexical unit in the source language can be semantically narrower than its equivalent in the target language. Such discordance can be a source of misunderstanding and mistakes, which is intolerable in technical sciences. The weight is given the exactness of speech there.
During the analysis of differences in word-building the question is asked in which way the Czech language creates equivalents to the German compound nouns. At first, the morphological structure of selected lexical units is investigated; the way they were created is specified and finally it is determined which means are used in the Czech language to create equivalents to determining components of German compound nouns. In the examples analyzed, the German determining component was transformed into the Czech language as:
1. adjective attribute standing in pre-position, 2. genitive attribute standing in post-position, 3. prepositional attribute standing in post-position.
The fact that a dash is used more substantially for building new terms in German than in Czech cannot also be omitted. In contradistinction to the Czech language, there is a need in German to gain as exact determination as possible. Some German abbreviations and
acronyms are used in Czech in this way: abbreviations are used from now on, especially when it is an acronym, but the whole term wording is translated.
At the end of the work, the fact is referred to that the sharp discordance exists between the extensive number of scientific papers on logistics on one hand, and a restricted number of works about logistics terminology on the other hand, whose research is at the beginning.