Tarptautinė mokslinė konferencija „Current Trends in Terminology“

International Scientific Conference Current trends in terminology JOLANTA GAIVENYTĖ-BUTLER Institute of the Lithuanian Language On 9–10 November 2006, an international scientific conference Current trends in terminology (Contemporary Trends in Terminology) was held at Berzsenyi Dániel College in Szombathely, Hungary, with speakers from twelve European countries—Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Slovakia—and Iran. The conference ran for two days in three sections: Terminology and translation (Terminology and Translation), National terminologies and terminology policies (National Terminologies and Terminology Policy), and Terminography and LSP lexicography (Terminography and Special Language (LSP) Lexicography). Papers were presented in English and German. A collection of conference abstracts was published, and a collection of articles is also planned. The conference was organized by the Department of Uralic Studies, the Department of Applied Linguistics, and the Centre for Terminology Innovation at Berzsenyi Dániel College, together with the Hungarian Terminology Council MaTT and the Hungarian National Commission for UNESCO. The conference participants were welcomed by Prof. Károly Gadányi, rector of Berzsenyi Dániel College; Dr. Katalin Molnár, dean of the Faculty of Humanities; and Prof. János Pusztay, chair of the organizing committee. Three papers were presented at the plenary session. Valentīna Skujiņa of the Latvian Language Institute and Ilze Ilziņa of the Riga Institute of Information Technology introduced the new needs facing Latvian terminologists. Their paper Challenges of Latvian terminology in a multilingual society (Challenges of Latvian Terminology in a Multilingual Society) briefly recalled the history of Latvian terminology, described the work of the Terminology Commission of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, and surveyed current problems in Latvian terminology: an abundance of unjustified synonyms, the emergence of polysemy influenced by other languages, conflicting meanings of international terms, and confusion caused by terms from different fields that partly overlap in form but designate different concepts. 188 Jolanta Gaivenytė-Butler | Tarptautinė mokslinė konferencija Current... Examples from telecommunications and information technology showed that creating national terminology requires thorough analysis of the structure and semantics of terms in different languages. The presentation by Christian Galinski, director of Infoterm, Terminology in the web (accessibility), via the web (distribution) and through the web (creation) (Terminology on the Web (Accessibility), Using the Web (Distribution), and Through the Web (Creation)) addressed the need to develop precise, correct terminology that is readily and promptly accessible. The presentation recalled old but still unresolved problems in terminology: insufficient recognition of its importance, a lack of readily accessible quality resources, the use of outdated and labor-intensive methods (which are also costly), a lack of mutual respect and cooperation among specialists from different fields in terminology work, and other issues. The speaker emphasized the importance of developing and managing terminology at the very earliest stages of product or service development. Rita Temmerman of Erasmus Hogeschool in Brussels, who was scheduled to present at the plenary session, could not attend; consequently, at the conference organizers’ request, E. Papp delivered her paper, Why we need dynamic terminological resources (Why We Need Dynamic Terminology Resources). It focused primarily on the cognitive approach to terminology and variation in the terminology of different types of discourse. Most papers were presented in the section National terminologies and terminology policies. A. Auksoriūtė and J. Gaivenytė-Butler introduced the audience to the general principles of Lithuanian terminology. Their paper briefly discussed the origins of Lithuanian terminology, devoting more attention to the terminology work of J. Pabrėža and S. Šalkauskis and K. Gaivenis’s attempts to formulate principles for Lithuanian terminology. K. Kerremans of Erasmushogeschool spoke about variants of electronic human resource management (e-HRM) terms. He emphasized that terms for assessing personal abilities and competence form a very important part of the professional terminology used by large companies, drew attention to the variation in these terms, and introduced the PoCeHRMOM project, whose aim is to create a trilingual terminology inventory for this field. A. Foris, representing Berzsenyi Dániel College, presented a paper on applying the theory of scale-free networks to terminology. The speaker emphasized that terminological graphs (trees) can ensure the precise formulation of knowledge conveyed in any field. O. Czékman compared the terminology used in German and Hungarian mathematics textbooks for higher education. A paper by three authors from the University of Pécs—E. Zsigmond, L. Kozma, and T. Laczkó—discussed the recent de- Terminologija | 2007 | 14 1 8 9 Hungarian health-care terminology of the century. The speakers drew attention to the fact that new fields take over old concepts and old terms, but the old terms acquire new meanings, making it necessary to harmonize systems of concepts and terms. Z. Makai presented an analysis of Hungarian radiology terminology based on corpus data, aimed at identifying the most important radiology concepts, determining the relationships between terms and concepts, defining new terms, and improving the term system. J. Pusztay of Berzsenyi Dániel College spoke about the development of terminology in regional Finno-Ugric languages. I. Dósa of the Budapest Business School, comparing English and Hungarian accounting terminology, emphasized the need to notice and understand differences in the terminology of different languages and the sources of errors arising from these differences. J. Levická of the Ľudovít Štúr Linguistics Institute gave a presentation on terminology work in Slovakia, the terminology portal under development, and a monolingual term database. K. Babos (Hungary) presented institutions working in terminology in Portugal and terminology projects in Portuguese-speaking countries. H. Van der Vliet and M. Meinen introduced the audience to the activities of Dutch terminologists. Seeking to bridge the gap between scholars interested in theoretical aspects of terminology and users of terminology (translators, government agencies, etc.), the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union) established SNT (Steunpunt Nederlandse Terminologie), which is to provide information on terminology matters and promote the use of Dutch terminology. V. Voigt of the Hungarian Terminology Council MaTT raised the question of whether there are contemporary trends in terminology. In the professor’s view, if terminology can be considered a branch of applied linguistics, it is influenced by current trends in linguistics and lexicography. In Hungary, where terminology is a relatively new field, all trends influencing terminology work are contemporary. S. Nematzadeh of Alzahra University introduced the audience to the creation of terminology in Iran and used examples from Persian to illustrate the criteria for selecting terms proposed by the Terminology Department of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. H. Palm spoke about the growing awareness of the importance of terminology work in Sweden and a new problem facing the Swedish Centre for Terminology, TNC: the overuse by various terminology-project participants of the term definition, when, because the concept of definition is insufficiently understood, there is an effort to define everything instead of listing, describing, or specifying it. Z. Rihmer of the University of Szeged gave a very detailed presentation on changes in the concepts designated by the term editio typica in liturgical publications and their influence on the translation of this term into other languages and on the entire system of liturgical publica- 190 Jolanta Gaivenytė-Butler | Tarptautinė mokslinė konferencija Current... tions. This section also included a couple of presentations on place names. G. Szabómihály of Slovakia spoke about variations in Hungarian place names used in Hungary and in the former territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the need to harmonize them. L. Salvato and G. Gobber of the Catholic University of Milan, drawing on examples from various countries, discussed the problems posed by variations in place names. The section Terminology and Translation focused mainly on the difficulties of translation and the search for suitable equivalents. The presentation by L. Ablonczy–Mihályka and K. Ziska-Kiczenko of Széchenyi István University was devoted to Hungarian terminology in regional economics. The speakers discussed some terms in this field from other languages and their Hungarian equivalents, and mentioned dictionaries and databases containing the most accurate terms in the field. D. Tamás of Eötvös Loránd University compared bilingual and multilingual printed and electronic economics term dictionaries published in Hungary, examining the equivalence of terms and concepts presented in them. E. Cauna presented the Academic Term Database created at the Latvian Academy of Sciences, which contains Latvian, English, and Russian terms from more than twenty fields, collected from various dictionaries published in Latvia over the past century. E. Bérces’s presentation discussed terms denoting musical tempo found in various dictionaries published in Hungary. P. Heltai of the University of Pannonia, drawing on examples from dictionaries and corpora, examined English and Hungarian terms from several fields. The speaker pointed out that the linguistic features of terms in different languages change just as those of everyday vocabulary do, and are influenced by the same lexical-semantic processes. Therefore, the translation of terms cannot always be an automatic process, even when terms in two languages coincide and dictionaries or term banks are available. I. Prosenc Šegula of the University of Ljubljana spoke about various terminology problems that arose as she translated Primo Levi’s collection of essays I sommersi e I salvati from Italian into Slovenian. J. Horváth’s presentation, illustrated with interesting examples, addressed the difficulties of translating English and American contracts into Hungarian. The speaker noted that English legal language has specific features and related translation problems at the lexical, semantic, and syntactic levels (frequent use of archaic words, terms acquiring specialized, narrowly used meanings, and fairly common tautological word combinations). Z. Bánhegyi and T. Koltay examined some new library and information science terms borrowed from English and their Hungarian equivalents. Terminologija | 2007 | 14 191 The section Terminography and Specialized-Language (LSP) Lexicography focused mainly on multilingual terminology resources in various countries and the challenges involved in creating them. E. Papp of the University of Pécs introduced a Hungarian culture dictionary being prepared for learners of Hungarian. E. Terestvéni of the Budapest Business School spoke about the terminology of ecotourism, the newest and fastest-growing branch of tourism. The speaker drew attention to unsettled concepts and the variation in English and Hungarian terms, as well as similarities and differences between terms in these languages. E. Rádai-Kovács and M. Fisher’s presentation was devoted to EU terminology. The authors examined the interaction between languages and conceptual systems at the EU level and its impact on the creation of terms in many languages, and noted that the creation of multilingual terminology in the fields of administration and, in part, law at the EU level is based primarily on direct translation of terms, whereas in specialized fields (environmental protection, migration policy, etc.) greater attention is paid to finding equivalents. I. Fata of Péter Pázmány Catholic University spoke about a Hungarian-German pension insurance dictionary under development. The speaker noted that the German section is being compiled using terms employed not only in Germany but also in Austria and Switzerland, so the dictionary’s central principle is “two languages—four conceptual systems.” A. Braasch, L. Henriksen, and C. Povlsen of the University of Copenhagen, drawing on their experience in developing IATE and EuroTermBank, introduced strategies for automatically merging entries from several terminology resources. The presentation by B. De Santis, M. Tiberi, and F. Mazzocchi was devoted to the representation of languages and cultures in multilingual terminological thesauri. The authors noted that multilingual thesauri based on a monolingual (usually English) thesaurus do not reflect differences between the conceptual systems and terminology of different languages. H. J. Kockaert, T. Vanallemeersch, and F. Steurs of Lessius Hogeschool discussed the importance of tools for extracting terms used in a corpus when harmonizing legal terminology in translations. Two presentations were given at the closing session. Gábor Prószéky’s presentation, Development of a Hungarian ontology and its applications (Vengriškos ontologijos rengimas ir taikymas), by a representative of MorphoLogic and Péter Pázmány Catholic University, reviewed ontology projects—the English WordNet and the multilingual EuroWordNet and BalkaNet. The speaker also introduced the Hungarian version of WordNet. Arvi Tavast of Tallinn University gave a presentation entitled Functionalism in terminology (Funkcionalizmas terminologijoje), which discussed not only primary and secondary nomination, but also 192 Jolanta Gaivenytė-Butler | Tarptautinė mokslinė konferencija Current... The third nomination, in which a term is translated without understanding the concept, was briefly discussed, along with the functionalist approach to semantics. The speaker asked whether this approach could improve the practical results of terminological work and also presented data from a survey. The conference proceedings were reviewed by one of its organizers, Dr. Ágota Fóris. Current issues in terminology were examined at the conference in Szombathely, and experiences from various countries were shared. Even today, fragments of the stone-paved Amber Road, which connected the Roman Empire with the shores of the Baltic Sea, can be seen in this city. For centuries, this road linked the peoples of Europe through trade. Last November, it symbolically connected the countries of Southern and Central Europe, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia through scholarly ties. Received 2007-12-11 Jolanta Gaivenytė-Butler Institute of the Lithuanian Language P. Vileišio g. 5, LT-10308 Vilnius Email: [email protected] Terminologija | 2007 | 14 193