The paper investigates the consequences of imbalances in the documentation available in leading edge science and technology in English and Italian for the creation of terminology resources. By analysing a corpus of academic papers, instructional texts and popular science texts in nuclear/particle physics and especially patterns of term formation and types and features of definitions, the authors suggest that loss of domain-specific information due to lack of documentation – especially as far as some text types are concerned – can be partly overcome if multilingual term collections combine the wealth and variety of information available in English as the lingua franca of science with information in Italian that meets the requirements of translation of textbooks and popular science texts – the types of documents that are still produced in languages such as Italian.