As a Master’s student of Translation Technology in Dublin City University, one of the main modules I had the pleasure to attend was Computerised Terminology. The insight I gained through the final project was invaluable as I had the chance to work for WIPO Pearl, World Intellectual Property. The project consisted of preparing terminological resources for patent translators in the specialised area of Organic Electronics, a domain that was in need of being populated further.
The challenges to be tackled were many! First of all, the selection of the concepts. Since the objective of the project was creating a concept system, the 8 terms had to be related to each other by specific relations, i.e.: generic, partitive and associative. It required a certain level of understanding of the domain itself, which being a combination of engineering and science, represented a difficult subject for a layperson with a background oriented towards humanities.
A further issue concerned the collection of terminological information to contextualise the concepts. Due to the importance of producing reliable term records, the guidelines provided by WIPO were quite strict. The recommended sources included firstly patents, then articles in scientific and technical journals, academic papers and textbooks. On the other hand, dictionaries, glossaries, multilingual websites, Wikipedia and any URLs were considered as ineligible sources. Being Organic Electronics a relative new field of study – intensive research has been conducted only from the 80’s onwards- there are not many available textbooks and most were outdated sources. Contrarily, there was a considerable amount of up-to-date academic and scientific papers, which (unfortunately!) happened to have a limited accessibility: considerable fees need to be paid for either consulting the source or subscribing to e-journals containing the material.
The extensive research of terminological material was an essential phase for the creation of the term records comprising two sections, an entry level and a term level. The entry level consisted of subject field and subfield, and concept relation, while the term level comprised of term, term type (head term or synonym), context and source.
The following screenshot (Figure 1) taken from WIPO Pearl website, shows the conceptual map of Organic Solar Cell, which I selected for my research. It also includes related concepts such as ‘bilayer heterojunction’, ‘organic tandem solar cell’, ‘buffer layer’, ‘active layer’, etc.
Figure 1. Organic Solar Cell conceptual map in Wipo Pearl website
To conclude, no matter the difficulties encountered, finally seeing the terms I worked on displayed in WIPO term base was extremely rewarding and fed my passion for Terminology.
To read the paper, please click on: The Concept System of an Organic Solar Cell: A terminological resource for patent translators.
Giulia Mattoni
Termcoord Terminology Trainee, Postgraduate in MSc. in Translation Technology at Dublin City University. Experienced in Statistical Machine Translation for the Gaming Industry. Italian native speaker, fluent in English and Spanish. Skilled in the use of SDL Trados, Sketch Engine, KantanMT, and with knowledge of Java Programming.
Sources:
- World intellectual property organization – Available at: http://www.wipo.int/portal/en/index.html (Accessed: 13 October 2016).
- Wipo pearl – Google-Suche – Available at: http://bit.ly/2dUBcax (Accessed: 13 October 2016).