Software – Hard for National Termbanks?

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lsp2015The constant development of the society leads to new terminology technologies that should help the storage of terminology data. Nowadays there is an ongoing effort for providing to individuals or entities the free and efficient access to platforms terminologically useful.

Software – Hard for National Termbanks? is the presentation by Henrik Nilsson and Sandra Cuadrado at the 20th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes describing the national situation of the terminological support. The authors introduce European platforms such as EuroTermBank or IATE and provide a comparative presentation of national termbanks in Europe. They focus mostly on the Spanish and Swedish context by presenting an overview of the existing termbanks.

According to this study, the number of national termbanks keeps growing, although in Sweden, there is one since 2009: Rikstermbanken, while in Catalonia Cercaterm is used since 2000. Given the wide-scale user group of national termbanks, the paper Software – Hard for National Termbanks? reflects upon the features of such termbanks and consequently, what demands should the software fulfill in order to host them.

The most particular features: the handling of terminology doubles (a consequence of gathering a large amount of data in one place), reviews and term voting and other crowd-related features, the result of interaction with users, the role of the targets and the digital networks for reaching consensus as well as a more general discussion on distributed versus non-distributed solutions.

An interesting part of this paper is also the concept of national termbanks and the criteria that termbanks are expected to meet. Creating a termbank is a process based on several criteria (quality control by terminologists, use of purpose-built software) that have to be taken into account in order to make them accessible to a large and yet specialized public. However, there are also challenges related to content, presentation and harmonization.

The process goes from comparing linguistic variants in order to select the content to arching the results by thinking how to facilitate the updating process.

Authors: Nilsson, Henrik TNC/EAFT, SE and Cuadrado, Sandra Termcat, ES

Henrik Nilsson is a content manager for the national term bank Rikstermbanken and he has been providing terminological support for Swedish Centre for Terminology, Eurodicautom and IATE. One of his main research areas is debugging for lazy functional languages.

Sandra Cuadrado is a digital communication and international cooperation manager for TERMCAT. She collaborated with STAITEC Tech transfer as communication consultant and developed particular interests for terminology and Catalan linguistic features.

Here you can find the presentation and the abstract of the research.

 

 

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Written by Mioara Stroe,
Terminology Trainee at TermCoord