Resíduos e Abfälle: um reconhecimento terminológico para a busca de equivalências entre o português e o alemâo

Abstract

Based on the search for German equivalents in Portuguese for a glossary on environmental management which has been developed by Termisul research team, this paper describes both the research which was carried out to identify the unity which receives the status of equivalent and the occurrence of Komposita in texts related to resíduos (“wastes”) and Abfälle. The research was carried out with distinct corpora for the analysis on wastes terminology in Portuguese and German. As a result, we observed that there is no absolute equivalence between Brazilian Portuguese and German, especially because there are subcategories of Abfälle in German which does not correspond to the subcategories of resíduos in Portuguese. Such a fact does not make it impossible to indicate an equivalent for the reader, although there are cases of conceptual or denominative gaps. The contrast among the equivalent sources was important to validate the information offered to the reader. From the point of view of the observed Komposita, there was a larger occurrence of terms formed by two elements. Moreover, we noticed that the term Abfälle just occurs as a base term, while Abfall and Müll occur as determiners most of the times. The research indicates that the communicative scenario has an important influence on the selection and on the characteristics of the terms.