Mokslinė konferencija „Kalbos teorija ir praktika“

Scientific Conference Language Theory and Practice AUŠRA RIMKUTĖ Institute of the Lithuanian Language On November 9, 2007, a scientific conference entitled Language Theory and Practice was held, organized by the Department of Linguistics of the Faculty of Humanities at Kaunas University of Technology and the Language Culture Division and Terminology Centre of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. The conference was opened and participants were welcomed by Jurgita Mikelionienė, Head of the Department of Linguistics, and Prof. Giedrius Kuprevičius, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Two papers were presented at the plenary session. The topic of the paper by Aldona Paulauskienė, professor in the Department of Linguistics at Kaunas University of Technology, was Oppositions and Their Neutralization in Paradigms of Grammatical Categories. According to the speaker, the search for oppositions in paradigms is a principle of describing linguistic phenomena established by general linguistics. The ingenious application of the principle of oppositions in descriptions of morphology makes it possible to solve with ease problems that at first glance seem difficult to resolve. A. Paulauskienė spoke in greater detail about the grammatical categories of the verb—person, mood, voice, and aspect—as the members of the paradigms of all these categories are linked by oppositional relations, and in all categories the contrast between marked and unmarked members is evident. In her paper Neologisms in Translated Literature: Choices and Mismatches, Jurgita Girčienė (Vilnius Pedagogical University) examined neologisms used in literary texts translated into Lithuanian during the period 1990–2006. She identified two main problems in naming new realities with neologisms. The first concerns competition between new foreign words and their equivalents expressed as new compound names or neologisms; the second concerns the adaptation of new foreign words. After the plenary session, work continued in two sections. One section was devoted to problems of terminology and translation. Aušra Rimkutė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) presented the paper The Ordering of Religious Terminology in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. According to the speaker, Lithuanian religious terminology is one of the oldest areas of Lithuanian terminology. In the late nineteenth century– 194 Aušra Rimkutė | Mokslinė konferencija Kalbos teorija... At the beginning of the twentieth century, concern arose about the language of religious texts, and efforts began to standardize highly impure religious terminology. The work of the Prayer Book Commission, established in 1909, was particularly important: through collaboration between clergy and linguists, the language of the most important prayers and catechism prayers was standardized, most terms of foreign origin were replaced with Lithuanian ones, and only those without equivalents in Lithuanian were retained. Diana Šilobritaitė’s (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) paper Terminological Synonymy in Mathematics Textbooks from the First Half of the Twentieth Century focused on mathematical terminology. She discussed synonyms in mathematical terms found in textbooks from the beginning and middle of the twentieth century, considering their structure and origin, and noted that terminology in this field is relatively recent and that the period under discussion was very important in the development of school mathematics terminology. In her paper The Influence of English on Linguistics Terminology, Dalia Masaitienė (Vytautas Magnus University) examined the significance of English for recent Lithuanian works on linguistic terminology. She discussed new English borrowings and their adaptation into Lithuanian, and also examined some characteristic trends in the use of linguistic terms that reflect the influence of English, identifying cases of synonymy among terms and discussing their causes. The speaker drew on recent works in linguistics and scholarly articles. Virginija Stankevičienė (Kaunas University of Technology) spoke about Synonymy and Variant Forms of Lithuanian and International Terms in Economic Terminology. Using the Dictionary of Economic Terms (R. Vainienė, 2005), scholarly articles, and textbooks, she discussed the origin of single-word and compound economic terms, as well as their synonyms. Vilija Celišienė (Kaunas University of Technology) presented the paper Usage Trends for Computer Science Borrowings and Their Equivalents. The aim of the paper was to analyze trends in the use of computer science borrowings and their Lithuanian equivalents in students’ speech, and to identify the factors influencing their choice. Questionnaire data show that computer science borrowings are used considerably more often than their Lithuanian equivalents: 60.5% of respondents use borrowings, while only 39.5% use Lithuanian terms. The choice of foreign words is influenced primarily by their familiarity, convenience, and comprehensibility, while conformity to language norms is not an important factor. Judita Džėžulskienė (Kaunas University of Technology) discussed Word Order in Compound-Term Structures. When translating or creating compound terms, the question arises as to the order in which their components should be arranged. It is therefore useful, the speaker noted, to analyze the structural configurations of such compounds and to identify trends in word order in terminology. Terminologija | 2007 | 14 195 J. Džežulskienė studied three-word telecommunications terms and found that most of these terms consist of one noun and two modifiers. Asta Mitkevičienė and Albina Auksoriūtė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language) presented the terminology portal www.eurotermbank.com, which is the result of the EuroTermBank (Collection of European terminology resources through cooperation among terminology institutions) project, carried out in 2005–2006 by seven countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Germany and Denmark). It is a European terminology bank where, alongside Latvian, Estonian, Polish, Hungarian, English and other-language terms, Lithuanian terms can also be found. It currently contains more than 1.5 million terms from various fields and over 600,000 terminology records. The new terminology portal will be useful to translators, terminologists, editors, etc., as well as to organizations and individuals wishing to publish their terminology collections publicly. In his presentation Specifics of Translating and Adapting Software Interfaces, Gintautas Grigas (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics) discussed the specific nature of software interfaces with users (windows, menu items, command names, computer messages), which gives rise to distinctive features in their translation. According to him, the text must not only be translated but also adapted so that it accurately conveys the program’s function. Experience in localizing open-source and commercial software has shown that these problems can be overcome through creative translation, by drawing on translations into other languages, and by conducting comprehensive testing of the entire localization. The presentation Machine Translation and/or Language Culture? by Erika Rimkutė and Jolanta Kovalevskaitė (Vytautas Magnus University) also explored translation problems that arise when texts are translated into Lithuanian automatically. Translation issues were also discussed by Eglė Kontutytė, lecturer in the Department of German Philology at Vilnius University (Legal Forms of Companies: Problems of Equivalence between German and Lithuanian Terms); Sigita Stankevičienė ((Non-)Translation of International Words) and Aurelija Leonavičienė (Translation of Detached Syntactic Constructions in French from a Stylistic Perspective), lecturers in the Department of Linguistics at Kaunas University of Technology; and lecturers at Vytautas Magnus University: Janina Liატukaitė (English Legal Institutions and Positions: Translation or Understanding?), Vitalija Liutvinskienė (Translation of Cohesive Devices into Lithuanian), Professor Milda Danýtė (Changes in Literary Translation Norms after 1990), and Associate Professor Irena Ragaišienė (Features of Addresser and Addressee Forms and the Significance of Intertextuality in the Translation of Helen Fielding’s Novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary” into 196 Aušra Rimkutė | Mokslinė konferencija Kalbos teorija... Lithuanian), Neringa Dziedravičiūtė (Problems in Translating Forms of Address: A Lithuanian Translation of Teacher–Student Dialogues in J. D. Salinger’s Novel “The Catcher in the Rye”), and Laura Butkutė, a doctoral student in the Department of Lithuanian Philology at Vilnius University’s Kaunas Faculty of Humanities (Translation of Phraseological Expressions in K. Boruta’s Novel “The Mill of Baltaragis”). A wide variety of language issues were explored in another section. Vitas Labutis (Vilnius University) gave a presentation entitled Impersonal Sentences in English and Lithuanian, while Carmen Caro (Vilnius University) presented The Problem of Verb Tense Categories in Translation from Spanish into Lithuanian and from Lithuanian into Spanish: The Semantics of Past Tenses. The topic of the presentation by Saulė Juzelėnienė (Kaunas University of Technology) and Ilona Sideravičiūtė-Mickienė (Kaunas Faculty of Humanities, Vilnius University) was The Expression of Grammatical Tenses in English and Lithuanian Academic Discourse. The presentation Structural Types of Syntactic Predicates, Their Morphosyntactic Expression and the Problem of Analyticity in English and Lithuanian by Dana Švenčionienė (Kaunas University of Technology) also addressed syntactic issues. In their presentation Principles for Creating a Speech Sound Corpus, Asta Kazlauskienė and Gailius Raškinis (Vytautas Magnus University) gave a fuller account of the methods used to collect and prepare the university’s speech sound corpus for publication online, as well as its transcription and linguistic and non-linguistic tags. The presentation by Inga Bertašienė (Vilniaus College), Vaida Buivydienė and Regina Žukienė (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University) was entitled Distance Learning Course “Language Culture for Professional Purposes” and the Realities of Its Application. At the end of the conference, a discussion entitled Teaching Language for Professional Purposes in Higher Education: Sharing Experience was held, with Jurgita Girčienė, Regina Žukienė, Virginija Stankevičienė, Vilija Celiešienė, Saulė Juzelėnienė, Judita Džežulskienė, Erika Rimkutė and Asta Kazlauskienė taking part. The discussion was chaired by Loreta Vaicekauskienė (Institute of the Lithuanian Language, Vilnius University). The academic conference Theory and Practice of Language was interesting and useful not only for scholars but also for students. A collection of conference paper abstracts was published. Received 2007-11-19 Aušra Rimkutė Lietuvių kalbos institutas P. Vileišio g. 5, LT-10308 Vilnius E. paštas [email protected] Terminologija | 2007 | 14 197