Language planning and language

policy.

Challenges for translation work

Prof. dr. Frieda Steurs

KULeuven

TermNet international

Terminology

• Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms

are words and compounds (multi-word units) that in

specific contexts are given specific meanings, meanings

that may deviate from the meaning the same words have

in other contexts and in everyday language.

• The science of terminology : theoretical science on

systems and concepts and their designations

• Terminology work : planning, development, processing,

representation or dissemination of terminology

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• Administrative texts

• Legal documents

• Medical and biomedical material

• ICT

• Manuals, userguidelines

• Audiovisual translation (subtitling)

• Product Localisation

• Websites : e-sales, business texts

• Marketing, advertising, etc.

Specialised texts : the market (Belgium)Dutch/French/English/German

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Revenue of the language industry

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Translation, interpreting, GILT

Language teaching

Audiovisual translation

Language technology

development

Multlingual

conference support

The Language Industry• € 8.4 billion in 2008

• Less crisis-sensitive than other domains

• Average growth of 10% a year

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Terminology : an interdisciplinary science

• The intersection of various fields of knowledge

(logic, ontology, linguistics, information science,..)

• Terminological units can be seen as :

o linguistic entities in linguistics

o concept entities in ontology and cognitive sciences

o communicative units in the more restricted framework of

scientific & technical discourse • See Faber Benítez, Pamela. 2009. Cognitive shift in terminology and specialised

translation. In Africa Vidal & Javier Franco (eds.). Monographs in Translation and

Interpreting, A (Self-)Critical Perspective of Translation Theories, pp. 107-143

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Theory of terminology

1. the cognitive dimension : examines the concept relations and how the concepts constitute structured sets of knowledge units or concept systems in every area of human knowledge, as well as the representation of concepts by definitions and terms

2. the linguistic dimension : examines existing linguistic forms as well as potential linguistic forms that can be created in order to name new concepts

3. the communicative dimension : examines the use of terms as a means of transferring knowledge to different categories of recipients in a variety of communicative situations and covers the activities of compilation, processing and dissemination of terminological data in the form of specialized dictionaries, glossaries or terminological databases, etc. (Sager 1990)

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Stakeholders and target groups for terminology

• Defined corporate terminology is useful for various interest

groups

o Authors and content developers (source text)

o Translators (target language texts)

o Customers

o Business partners

o Suppliers

o Service providers

o Departments such as Service, Marketing, Sales

o …

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Terminology

• LSP

• Language for specific purposes

• Dynamics in language

• Continuous shifts and changes

• Different domains

• Different registers

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Creation of terms

• Technical advancements leave a mark on language

• Every new invention, technical detail etc. needs a term, a

linguistic designation

• Increasing speed of technical developments

• Worldwide networking of production and sales

• Scope of terminological neologisms

• Carmanual: thousands of terms

o Lexus, Kia, BMW

• Catalogues: Shimano http://www.shimano.com/

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IATE

• http://iate.europa.eu/

• http://termcoord.eu/

• http://termnet.org

• http://ecqa.org

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Arabterm

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http://www.arabterm.org/

Arabontology

• http://sina.birzeit.edu/ArabicOntology/

• Standards:

• http://www.arabterm.org/index.php?id=69

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Domain loss and domain dynamics

• Language planning

o “any activity carried out in organised form with the deliberate purpose of changing the spoken and written forms of a language.

• GUIDELINES FOR TERMINOLOGY POLICIES, Formulating and implementing terminologypolicy in language communities Prepared by Infoterm. Paris: UNESCO, 2005.

• A single person, a whole community, politics, …

• Fully developed languages : active corpus

o Improvement in the status of a language requires development and manintance of corpus

o Low priority of status leads to deterioration of corpus

o Status : the will of the language community to maintain and improve itscultural identity through a fully developed language in all domains of life

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Domain loss

• A fuzzy concept

• Substantial research confirmed considerabledomain losses in Danish

• Political trigger function (Catalan)

• Activities undertaken :

o Clarify domain-related concepts

o Organise the concepts into a coherent conceptualsystem

o Create an instrument for theoretical analysis and research and a practice-oriented tool forterminology planning

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Domain dynamics

• Conquest : development of means of professional

communication where previously lacking (eg : creationof Norwegian oil terminology)

• Reconquest : re-creation of terminology or updating

(eg : modern Icelandic terminology in fishing, navigation & mathematics)

• Expansion : simultaneous creation of all the means

necessary for the distribution of terminology (eg termbanks, etc.)

• Cultivation : creation of terminologies for completely

new areas of knowledge (gentechnology,etc)

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TNC

• Towards a national terminology infrastructure

• Swedish Centre for terminology

o Terminology portal with a national term bank

o Terminology coordination programme

o http://www.tnc.se/the-swedish-centre-for-terminology.html

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Conclusion

• Further research challenges

• Phenomenon of termcreation and borrowing

• Analysis of specialised subdomains

• Monolingual or multilingual

• An onomasiological approach

• A view on language planning and language policy

• http://www.termnet.org

• “There is no knowledge without terminology”

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