L’analyse conceptuelle des éléments tax, impôt et taxe à l’épreuve de la formalisation distributionnaliste des exemples de traduction de tax comme élément unitaire, noyau ou modifieur

We first describe the method of extraction of key economic and financial concepts from the IATE database, which is at the basis of the conceptual and terminological analysis of the key concepts of tax in English, French and Italian, and the distributional and discourse analysis of examples of translations of tax into French in three lexical-syntactic constructions, namely tax as a unitary element, as head element or as a modifier element. In the first part, our analysis of the definitions in fiscal law of tax, taxe, impôt and the uses of imposta and tassa in Italian confirms the conceptual vagueness induced by the legislator and the incompatibility of the defining features of these concepts in different language-cultures, which ultimately explains the quasi-synonymy of taxe and impôt in French. In the second part, the analysis of 103 examples of the translation of tax into French in the three basic lexical-semantic constructions of tax confirms the general quasi-synonymy of the two terms in French with some specializations in terms of their uses according to the syntactic constructions of the element tax. Our two-part analysis, conceptual and translational, shows that these two analyses feed each other. Despite the conceptual vagueness that gives rise to sometimes inconsistent uses of tax and impôt, the translation examples show the existence of pragmatic and discursive criteria for differentiating the uses of tax and impôt in specialized language that translators exploit in discourse to reduce conceptual vagueness.