Some of the principles from the foreign sources we could use, but others where not immediately adaptable, because the intrinsic features of the sign languages in question did not coincide with parallel features in NSL. Some examples of this will be shown and discussed later in this paper. In Norway, physics language uses a lot of English-derived terms. Our initial goal was to utilize as much as possible of ASL terminology. Because of the differences in basic characteristics of ASL and NSL respectively, this goal could not be fulfilled.

Whenever the class met a new concept, that concept was explained and discussed in detail, most often with hands-on experiments. The Norwegian word for the concept was given, and effort was also made to find out what other things that word might mean (if it was an everyday word), what other words that might resemble it and mean almost the same (like derivatives of the word), and what words might resemble it, and must not be confused with the one in question. If the word was constructed from Greek/ Latin or an acronym, they were analyzed on that basis as well. Similar methods are used in terminology work in general (Picht and Draskau 1985; Myking 1998).