International scientific conference

Terminology and Terminography: Development, Current Issues, Prospects

ASTA MITKEVIČIENĖ

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

On 10–11 October 2013, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language hosted an international scientific conference on terminology, held every other year. The title of this year’s conference was Terminology and Terminography: Development, Current Issues, Prospects. It was organized by the Terminology Centre of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Infoterm (International Information Centre for Terminology). Ten papers were delivered in English and 14 in Lithuanian at the conference. Over the course of ten years, the terminology conference had become truly international: speakers from abroad came from Spain, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Russia, and Latvia (compare this with the international terminology conference of 2003, which was limited to the Baltic countries).

The conference was opened by invited speaker Sergiusz Grinewas-Griniewiczius (University of Białystok, Moscow Humanitarian Pedagogical Institute), who spoke about the principles and prospects of terminological activity. The speaker discussed terminology science (theoretical activity) and terminology work (practical activity) separately. According to the professor, practical terminology work includes taking stock of terminology, its management, harmonizing individual terminologies, constructing term systems, terminographic activity, terminological editing, expert review, translation, terminology documentation and information services, implementing standardized terminology, training terminologists and non-specialists, and terminology management and planning.

Professor Emeritus Heribert Picht examined concepts as a reflection of social change. In his view, social concepts: 1) are usually interdisciplinary, 2) some may be highly normative, 3) their life cycle is largely determined by social factors, 4) most are constructs, 5) they depend on ideology or religion, 6) they can be disputed and interpreted, and 7) they may change suddenly or gradually. International

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The Latvian and Lithuanian team—Juris Borzovs (University of Latvia), Albina Auksoriūtė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language), and Ilze Irēna Ilziņa (Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia)—prepared a paper on information technology (IT) terminology in Latvia and Lithuania. After selecting 220 English IT terms, their equivalents in Latvian and Lithuanian were analyzed—818 and 276, respectively. Infoterm representatives Blanca Stella Giraldo Perez and Christian Galinski spoke about the differences and similarities between microterminology and structured content. They compared the concepts of content, information, and data; structured content with unstructured content; and the unit of microterminology with the terminological record, and discussed digital learning objects. Elvira Sorokina’s (Moscow State Regional University) paper addressed the ever-relevant problem of terminological synonymy. The professor reviewed the causes of the emergence of synonymous terms.

The other invited speaker, Anita Nuopponen from the University of Vaasa (Finland), examined social media as a tool for terminological information and activity. Social media is useful for communication in terminological work (e.g., LinkedIn), sharing (e.g., terminology blogs, Pinterest), meetings (e.g., Webinar), teaching and learning (Webinar), collaboration (TermWiki), and research.

Susanne Lervard (Termplus ApS and the Textile Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen) presented the Danish project textilnet.dk. One of its objectives is to create an online database of historical textile and costume terminology (http://dragt.dk). Ricardo Eito-Brunas, associate professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid, spoke about integrating linguistic resources into engineering processes and proposed ways to make XML-based termbases compatible with the equipment engineers use to manage technical content. Péter Gaál (University of Pécs, Hungary) presented a paper prepared jointly with Ágota Fóris (Károli Gáspár University, Hungary), Lexicography and Terminography in Terminology Teaching. A two-year master’s programme in terminology had begun in Hungary. Evgenia Dimitrieva (Baltic State Academy of Fishing Fleet, affiliated with Kaliningrad State Technical University) spoke about Maritime English and its teaching at a maritime school.

The papers delivered in Lithuanian addressed both the history of terminology and contemporary issues in the field. Stasys Keinys (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) spoke about the univocity and ambiguity of terms. According to the associate professor, in both research and practical terminology work

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it is not always appropriate to use words with an imperative meaning requirement, prohibition, cannot; perhaps we ourselves do not always know whether a term is truly unambiguous or, all the more so, whether it will remain so after some time. Robertas Stunžinas (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) analysed the microsystem of folk terms naming building materials in terms of their origin, hierarchical relations, synonymy, and polysemy. Regina Kvašytė (Šiauliai University) compared Latvian (2011) and Lithuanian (2012) linguodidactics dictionaries published in recent years. The associate professor discussed terminographic aspects of the dictionaries, analysed their terminology, and observed that international terminology predominates in linguodidactics, although some successful neologisms are also found. Egidijus Zaikauskas (European Commission) spoke about the relationship between the English terms of the original language and their Lithuanian equivalents in translation. This relationship may be quantitative (the number of components) or qualitative (equivalence, specification, grammatical, morphological, and lexical expansion or contraction, grammatical and lexical substitution, demetaphorisation, etc.).

Several papers examined the history of terminology in particular subject fields. Diana Šilobritaitė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) spoke about the one-word terms in S. Skačkauskas’s Aritmetikos (1897) textbook—most of them are no longer in use, but they are important to the history of mathematical terminology. Palmira Zemlevičiūtė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) discussed the Lithuanian one-word medical terms in the first Lithuanian medical science journal, Medicina ir gamta (1913), their emergence and formation, and their relationship to current medical terminology. More than half of these terms have survived and continue to be used in medical science. Solvita Labanauskienė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) analysed Lithuanian and Latvian plant names in Antanas Juška’s Latvių-lietuvių-lenkų kalbų žodyne (c. 1875, unpublished) and Mykolas Miežinis’s Lietuviškai-latviškai-lenkiškai-rusiškame žodyne (1894). She spoke about the origin, synonyms, and variants of plant names. Aušra Rimkutė’s (Vytautas Magnus University) paper examined catechisms from 1800–1882 and their religious terminology. Asta Mitkevičienė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) discussed the names of figures and tropes in literary studies textbooks from 1918–1940, focusing chiefly on the origin, synonymy, and Lithuanianisation of the terms.

Other Lithuanian papers were in one way or another related to information technology. Corpus terminology was discussed in papers by two teams of speakers from Vytautas Magnus University. Erika Rimkutė and Irena Markievicz presented a work prepared in 2012 on the basis of a specialised corpus

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Švietimo ir mokslo terminų žodyną bei Švietimo ir mokslo terminų ontologiją (both available online). The dictionary defines about 300 terms and provides examples of their use, left and right collocates, concordances, and more. The class relationships and rules of the aforementioned ontology are constructed on the basis of the dictionary’s definitions. Agnė Bielinskienė, Loïc Boizou, and Jolanta Kovalevskaitė’s paper focused on identifying terminological contexts in education and science in a specialised corpus using a pattern-based method; using the most frequent patterns yields a fairly large number of relevant contexts.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Law on the Terms Bank of the Republic of Lithuania. In his paper, Alvydas Umbrasas (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) discussed the structure and content of the Terms Bank, query statistics, and more (http://terminai.vlkk.lt). The Terms Bank now contains more than 210,000 term records, over 9,000 approved legal-act terms, and data from 36 terminology dictionaries. It is currently the most comprehensive and reliable freely available source of Lithuanian terms. Egidijus Zai-kauskas (European Commission) discussed another large, systematic digital collection of terms—the IATE terminology database of EU institutions. It now contains about 48,000 Lithuanian terms (about 10,000 defined), of which about 3,500 have been rated “highly reliable”. The speaker compared the non-public internal IATE with the public IATE, which is available http://iate.europa.eu.

Renata Špukienė (Tilde IT) approached terminology and language from a business perspective. She presented the work of Tilde IT in localisation and machine translation, and discussed changes in the field, new challenges, and prospects. R. Špukienė concluded her paper with rhetorical questions: what will happen to terminology next; will software create terms, while terminologists merely review them?

The abstracts of the conference papers can be found on the website of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language (http://www.lki.lt/LKI_LT/images/TMA/2013_tez_s_abstracts.pdf).. The next international scholarly conference on terminology at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language will traditionally take place in a couple of years.

Received 2013-10-21

Asta Mitkevičienė Lietuvių kalbos institutas P. Vileišio g. 5, LT-10308 Vilnius E. paštas [email protected]

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Tarptautinė mokslinė konferencija Terminologija ir terminografija: raida, aktualijos, perspektyvos