Abbreviations in Terminology

GINTAUTAS GRIGAS

Institute of Mathematics and Informatics

Abbreviations are used in all fields of science, and they also find their way into terminology.

This article will discuss which abbreviations can be adopted directly from other languages, usually English, which should be translated, and which should be coined anew. Moreover, abbreviations are not only written but also read aloud. Therefore, their pronunciation must also be discussed.

Abbreviations are used especially extensively in informatics. This is because most informatics terms are related to computers, and the pioneers of computers, computer networks, and the Internet were Americans. Consequently, informatics terminology took shape in the environment of the English language, in which abbreviations are widely used.

1. NATIVE AND BORROWED ABBREVIATIONS OF TERMS

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a multi-word term, formed (usually) from the initial letters of the main words making up the term. A term may or may not have an abbreviation. If it does, the relationship between the use of the full term and its abbreviation is important: 1) the full term is better known and used more often than its abbreviation; 2) the abbreviation and the full term are used about equally often; 3) the abbreviation is used more often, while the full term is little known and rarely used.

The relationship between the use of a term and its abbreviation may differ from one language to another. Abbreviations are used less often in Lithuanian than in English. Therefore, when terms are translated or adopted from English, their abbreviations should fall into the same category (with the same or a lower number) as in English.

The division into categories is imprecise because the words “little” and “rarely” do not express a quantitative measure. However, if the same rules are followed in all the languages under consideration, inaccuracies should be reduced.

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Let us examine individual groups of terms according to their usage in foreign languages, most often English.

1. The full term is better known and more commonly used than its abbreviation.

Such abbreviations are not always included in terminology dictionaries, especially in their Lithuanian sections. At the beginning of an article or book, an abbreviation is explained, usually by giving the full term the first time it appears and indicating its abbreviation in parentheses. Thereafter, only the abbreviation is used. For example:

certificate revocation list, CRL – revoked certificate list;

network interface card, NIC – network card;

infra-red spectrometer, IR spectrometer – infrared spectrometer.

2. The abbreviation and the full term are used about equally often.

The full term is useful because it (usually) reflects the essence of the concept well, while the abbreviation is useful because it is short and its letters (usually) recall all the words in the term through their initial letters.

Usually, such a concept also has a fluent Lithuanian name—a term, for example:

operating system, OS – operating system, OS;

data base, DB – database, DB;

data base management system, DBMS – database management system, DBVS.

It is natural to form a Lithuanian abbreviation from the initial letters of the words in the Lithuanian name of a concept, that is, not to transfer it from another language. Sometimes a Lithuanian abbreviation may coincide with one in another language (examples 1 and 2), but this is merely a coincidence, not a rule.

A Lithuanian term may have no abbreviation, for example:

hard disk, HD – hard disk;

floppy disk, FD – floppy disk.

The term hard disk has no Lithuanian abbreviation, while floppy disk is short even without an abbreviation. In such cases, when translating from English, the abbreviation should be replaced with the full name of the corresponding concept. When the context makes the meaning clear, one may also omit the concept’s specific name and identify it only by a generic term (disk).

3. The abbreviation is more commonly used, while the full term is little known and rarely used. Such terms are abundant in informatics. Three subgroups can be distinguished within this group:

3.1. The full multiword English term is sufficiently informative, but it is more customary to use the abbreviation, for example:

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compact disk, CD – compact disc; recordable compact disk, CD-R – single-recording compact disc; rewritable compact disk, CD-RW – rewritable compact disc.

It was possible to find Lithuanian equivalents for these terms that are more informative than the English ones, so abbreviations are not needed either. In many cases, however, Lithuanian abbreviations may be used. In this respect, this group is similar to the second.

3.2. Informative components of a multiword term (individual words). Typical examples are the names of color models:

(red-green-blue), RGB – (red-green-blue), RŽM color model; (cyan-magenta-yellow), CMY – (cyan-magenta-yellow), ŽPG color model; (cyan-magenta-yellow-black), CMYK – (cyan-magenta-yellow-black), ŽPGJ color model.

Color names are written in parentheses because they do not form part of the term. In the color model called RGB in English, each color is expressed by the amounts of three primary colors—red, green, and blue—in that color. The color code is denoted by three numbers describing the proportion of each color component. To understand the color code, one must know which primary color each component represents. When using the English name of the model, only the first letter R (red) would be informative; the other two would have to be memorized: the letter G denotes green, and the letter B denotes blue. It is much simpler to use the Lithuanian abbreviation RŽM. Then each letter corresponds to the first letter of the name of a primary color, making color codes—which are constantly needed in computing—easier to read or write. Therefore, it is appropriate to refer to color models using Lithuanian abbreviations. Such abbreviations are also given in descriptions of color models (Fledžinskienė 2000).

3.3. The term is uninformative. Only the abbreviation is used. These are names of various communication protocols, formats, and formal languages, for example:

(Post Office Protocol), POP – (post office protocol). POP protocol; (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), SMTP – (simple mail transfer protocol), SMTP protocol; (Hypertext Markup Language), HTML – (hypertext document description language), HTML language; (basic input output system), BIOS – (basic input/output system), BIOS system.

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Many such terms can be regarded as proper names. For example, it is said that POP protocol is one particular protocol. However, it is not always possible to draw a line between common and proper names. For example, the BIOS system is an operating-system component that performs certain functions, but differs from one computer to another.

A typical example of a lack of informativeness is the pair of email protocols POP and SMTP. The former is used to receive messages, the latter to send them. However, the English names explain very little. It is unlikely that many English speakers could be found who know how to decipher these abbreviations.

The names of programming languages are more often treated as proper names, although some argue that they should be treated as common nouns, in the same way as the names of natural languages (e.g., Lithuanian, Polish).

Literal translations of the names of such concepts into Lithuanian would be just as uninformative, while meaning-based translations would lose their connection with the English names. It is therefore unlikely that they would catch on. All the more so because there are many such English abbreviations, and finding suitable Lithuanian names for all of them would be no easy task.

With all this in mind, such abbreviations should not be translated into Lithuanian, but used as symbolic names for objects. Since such abbreviations are not expanded when read and are not declined, related terms need to be added to them in connected text, for example, POP protocol, POP mail protocol. When an abbreviation is used to describe a type together with another related term, the generic term associated with the abbreviation may be omitted. For example, a server operating according to the POP protocol is called a POP server (not a POP protocol server). This solution was adopted in an encyclopedic dictionary (Dagienė 2005).

It is worth noting that other languages treat such abbreviations in a similar way.

2. PRONUNCIATION OF ABBREVIATIONS

Santrumpų tarimas paaiškintas norminiame leidinyje (LKRS 1992: 73). Santrumpa skaitoma paraidžiui iš eilės vardijant lietuviškus raidžių pavadinimus. Pavyzdžiui, DB skaitoma dė-bė, DBVS – dė-bė-vė-es. Tačiau pateikti tik lietuviškos kilmės santrumpų tarimo pavyzdžiai. Dėl to atsiranda abejonių, kaip tarti iš svetur atėjusias santrumpas, ar jų raides ištarti ta kalba, iš kurios kilusi santrumpa. ar lietuviškai?

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An argument in favor of pronouncing the letters of an abbreviation in a foreign language is that this accurately reflects their origin.

Arguments against pronouncing the letters of abbreviations in a foreign language are as follows:

1. One needs to know the names of the letters in the foreign language, and only those who know that language can pronounce them correctly.

2. The origin of not all abbreviations is known. Moreover, some abbreviations have mixed origins; for example, the second part of the name of the computer program interface RHIDE comes from English: IDE = integrated development environment, while the first part consists of the initials of Roberto Hioner [Höhner] (a surname of German origin), who improved this interface.

3. Lithuanian is a phonetic language (more precisely, close to phonetic). It is therefore unusual for a word to be pronounced differently from the way it is written.

The following arguments can be made for pronouncing the letters of abbreviations in Lithuanian:

1. In other languages, the letters of abbreviations are named in the language itself. I have never heard of English speakers pronouncing the letters in abbreviations from other languages differently from the way they are named in the English alphabet. For example, in spoken English, the Lithuanian television broadcaster (LTV) is called [el-ti-vi], the Latin CV (curriculum vitae) is called [si-vi], and the abbreviation of Greek origin ISO (Greek isos, meaning equal) is pronounced [ai-sou]. If we pronounced the abbreviation UAB for an English speaker as [u-a-bė], they would be unlikely to understand that it was UAB. Germans call LTV [el-te-fau]. The German spelling dictionary (DUW 2003) gives the pronunciation of some abbreviations derived from English, for example, CD [tse:ˈdeː], DVD [deːfauˈdeː].

2. In information technology, letters are not divided by language (Unicode 2003). There are no English, German, or Lithuanian letters. All of them, whether or not they have diacritical marks, belong to the same alphabet, in this case the Latin alphabet.

All this shows that it is natural to pronounce the letters in abbreviations as they are named in the language in which the abbreviation is used. Consequently, in a Lithuanian text, abbreviations should be read in Lithuanian (in an English text, in English; in a German text, in German; and so on).

Of course, there may be one or two exceptions. For example, the abbreviation BBC is pronounced bi-bi-si. This came about historically, because a few decades ago we also wrote Bi-Bi-Si. Moreover, this abbreviation reached us not in written form, but in spoken form (via BBC radio). However, there should not be many exceptions. A few years ago

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the abbreviation WWW aspired to be such an exception—many people pronounced it in English: [dabl ju-dabl ju-dabl ju]. By now, we have grown accustomed to pronouncing it in Lithuanian—[vė-vė-vė]. In some cases, when syllables can be formed from the letters of an abbreviation, the abbreviation may be read syllabically, for example, MIME protocol [mime protocol], GIF file [gif file].

3. CONCLUSIONS

When forming and using Lithuanian term abbreviations, the following rules should be observed:

1. Abbreviations of multiword Lithuanian terms (if needed) are formed from the corresponding Lithuanian term; that is, they are not borrowed from other languages.

2. Abbreviations are used less frequently in Lithuanian than in other languages. Consequently, a term that has an abbreviation in another language may not have one in Lithuanian.

3. Abbreviations that completely replace an entire uninformative term in other languages may be borrowed into Lithuanian as parts of a term that indicate its type.

4. Abbreviations that completely replace an entire term in other languages, but whose words (e.g., color names) are informative and important in the use of the term, are not borrowed into Lithuanian; instead, an abbreviation is formed from Lithuanian words.

5. Abbreviations are pronounced by naming their letters one by one using the Lithuanian names, regardless of the language from which the abbreviation originated.

LITERATŪRA

Dagienė V., Grigas G., Jevsikova T. 2005: Enciklopedinis kompiuterijos žodynas, Vilnius, TEV.

DUW 2003: Deutsches Universal Wörterbuch. 5, Dudenverlag.

Fledžinskienė G., Kaulakienė A., Žalkauskas V. 2000: Kompiuterio spalvų terminai. – Terminologija 7, 2000.

LKRS 1992: Lietuvių kalbos rašyba ir skyryba. Parengė N. Sližienė, A. Valeckienė, Vilnius.

Unicode 2003: The Unicode Standard. Version 4.0. The Unicode Consortium.

Gauta 2006-11-27

Gintautas Grigas Matematikos ir informatikos institutas Akademijos g. 4, Vilnius E. paštas [email protected]

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