Synonymy and variation in the domain of digital terrestrial television: Is Italian at risk?

This article presents the results of a bilingual (French-Italian) corpus-based terminological study on the language of digital terrestrial television (DVB_T). The research sets out to describe the main features of this specialized language from a socio-terminological perspective by assessing the role played by English and by investigating synonymy and variation within the domain-specific discourse in the two countries. The analysis revealed that both Italian and French DVT-B terminologies include a large number of English borrowings and are marked by a proliferation of synonyms and variants, probably for lack of standardization in this new developing domain. The existence of equivalences among synonymic forms in the two languages is used, to suggest that a new generation of terminological databases should be developed which allow for cross-linguistic correspondences to be established beyond the main-term level.