Terminology and terminography for architecture and building construction

Teaching terminology is a strategic response to the European Educational Convergence guidelines, taken by the Polytechnic University of Madrid. It is vested in a new course "English Terminology for Architecture and Building Construction" offered in the "Master of Techniques and Systems of Construction". The course is interdisciplinary, integrating material from the various sciences involved in architectural practice and exploring it through the discipline of applied linguistics, as recommended by Cabre (2003). The approach is bilingualized, working with Spanish architecture professionals in the medium of English. Students are made aware of the dynamic nature of terminology through corpus-building, and given first-hand experience of terminography through compiling their own bilingualized(1) termbanks of English architectural terms. A model online termbank system (TermFinder), which is being co-developed for architecture and building construction after successful testing in other professional fields, is also discussed.