Term and concept variation in climate change communication

Environmental science has become especially important because of a growing awareness of the need to slow global warming. As in all risk-related types of discourse, clear communication is the key. However, the frequent variation of terms and concepts in specialized domains may hinder effective communication. This paper analyzes the presence of term and concept variation in climate change terminology, which is illustrated with the concept global warming, its English variants and their translations into Spanish. Our goals were: (i) to examine how and why variation occurs, and (ii) to investigate its consequences, especially in translation contexts. For this purpose, we focused on English-Spanish translation by means of three parallel corpora: the OPUS2 English-Spanish corpus, the EurLex English-Spanish corpus, and Linguee. Our results showed that variation is very frequent in climate change communication, affecting semantics, the communicative situation or both. Inaccuracies were regularly found both in English and Spanish. These should be avoided because they can hinder communication and exacerbate hazards. Finally, the influence of communicative intention in the construction of climate change discourse was also confirmed.