Lexical profiling and building technical glossaries
Zorica Đurović, Tatijana Dlabač · Transportation research procedia · 2025
Building technical glossaries is common practice in both lexicography and technical sciences. Glossaries are particularly useful for non-native English speakers who use international publications, most of which are written in English. Such glossaries are usually provided by teachers or included as an appendix or index in textbooks or similar publications. However, contemporary corpus linguistics methods and software analysis can help us extract various lexical data from a technical corpus. In this paper, the joint efforts of linguistic and technical experts were employed to examine both approaches. Specifically, a textbook on experiments in electronics was used to test the method for building a list of the most frequent technical words and to compare it to the index provided at the end of the publication, taking into account the opinions of experts throughout the process. An electronics word list of the 68 most frequent technical (head)words from the presented experiments was produced, with additional data provided, as well as possibilities for further investigation. Additionally, the presented study highlights the importance of cooperation between instructors of English for Specific Purposes and instructors of technical courses.