IATE and LISE, a European project which addresses the need for consolidated administrative nomenclatures and legal terminologies, met in Vienna in July during the 19th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes. The Translation Centre for the Bodies of the EU (CdT) was invited as part of the test group which worked on the consolidation tools developed with IATE data in the framework of the project.
The LISE project concluded officially at the end of July and its members, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Budin from the University of Vienna, organised a track of presentations during the European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes to present the results and conclusions.
The first round of presentations by Tanja Wissik (University of Vienna) and Elena Chiocchetti (EURAC) dealt with workflows and everyday cooperation in the terminology field. They presented the findings of the interviews they carried out in 2011-2012 with terminologists and terminology managers of the most important European centres specialised in this field. They found out that there was a need for more and better trained staff, additional time for new projects and consolidation work, higher involvement from experts and better and more flexible tools. They also perceived among the interviewees a real desire to exchange information and to disseminate terminology as much as possible. The results of this work have been published in the form of guidelines on this link.
The technical overview came from Michael Wetzel (ESTeam), who described the most common issues present in terminology databases (misspellings, inconsistent term formation, wrong categorisations, duplicates and unbalanced language coverage). He presented the tools developed to tackle these formal and conceptual weaknesses in terminology resources, together with a collaboration platform developed to discuss terminological issues and share and rate proposals. A short demo of the tools can be seen in the URLs below:
He also introduced the upcoming technology developed on the basis of the LISE tools: Coreon.
Günther Schefbeck (Austrian Parliament) talked about the specific challenges of legal and legislative taxonomies resulting from the existence of numerous different legal and legislative systems, which implies expert knowledge not only in a particular knowledge system but also in the neighbouring and higher-level systems in order to be able to establish a link among them via a taxonomic superstructure.
The LISE track closed with a presentation by Paula Zorrilla-Agut (Translation Centre) on the clean-up, maintenance and consolidation efforts in IATE, and the benefits of more automatised and integrated quality assurance tools for linguistic, formal and conceptual checking. The presentation covered IATE history, how ownership perception has evolved during the last 10 years, consolidation challenges, how the tool has been continuously adapted to reflect different maintenance and consolidation needs, and the testing of the LISE tools carried out by central terminologists from different EU institutions earlier this year. A paper developing all this information will be published in the LSP 2013 proceedings.
The LISE project has now ended, but all partners expressed their interest in a continuous collaboration and information exchange.