Process of Terminography of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Students in the Urdu Language

The purpose of this study is to investigate the word-coining process for the Urdu language particularly within the genre of Information and Communication technologies (ICT) in Pakistan for proposing the secondary terms. Overreliance on borrowing and coin formation used extensively for term formation in Urdu is not only cognitively challenging but has also painstakingly generated Urdu terms with widely accepted pronunciation which also triggers schemata to the ICT terms. Coinages and loan translations from the root languages are in abundance in case of the Urdu language. Cabre’s (2000) Communicative Terminology Theory (CTT) has been used as a theoretical framework to coin new Urdu terminologies. In Pakistan, the need to coin new terms is emerging most strongly after the verdict of Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2014 to promulgate the use of Urdu (Target Language) as an official language at the national forum. Keeping in view the situation, methods from the historical study of term coining have been opted to explain the coining process. This study concludes that the redundant coining and loans from English tarnishes the purity of the Urdu language. This is not only limited to ICT terminology but can be further extended in all domains with a lexical debt owed to the English language in its day to day linguistic parlance. Borrowing, loan translation, hybrid formation, and proper translation are some popular means employedas methods of term translation.