Most modern theories of terminology have abandoned the traditional prescriptive approach and the Wüsterian ideal of biunivocal correspondence between terms and concepts, and have turned their attention towards the actual behaviour of terms in text and discourse. Variation and dynamics have thus become key concepts in these new lines of investigation, and synonymy, polisemy and vagueness are no longer banned words. The complexity of these phenomena varies of course from domain to domain, and can reach extreme expressions in subject areas which are experiencing a very rapid development. In such cases, it can really pose some challenges to terminologists but also, more generally, to translators and other communicators. The present paper aims at briefly illustrating one such domain, e.g. the terminology of e-mobility, focusing in particular on some problems linked with the proliferation of synonyms and variants and with the dynamics of the conceptual system.
