A box of cards
At a very young age I had the good luck and privilege of joining the translation service of an international organisation. I was fascinated by the multilingual environment which allowed me to use and practice all the languages I had studied, and also by the extremely interesting texts I had to translate in the European Parliament – for instance, the first Treaty of the European Union, high quality political speeches, reports in every field of the European legislation. It was easy to fall in love with my job, to fall in love with every single text that I was creating as my own new original in the target language. To always try to find the exact equivalent of the initial idea of the author, of the concept, and to transmit it to my reader with the best terms available. Because translating is a permanent exercise in terminology, and producing quality translation depends on the success of this exercise.
To achieve this, in the early eighties, like all conscientious translators, I had my boxes where I stored alphabetically the cards with the terms I found in dictionaries and specialised glossaries. I used to underline them with different colours, writing down the source and the field, drafting or copying a definition, and thus constantly enriching my collection in the languages I used for my daily work. Every translator had to be a terminologist as well, and the basic skill of a good terminologist was to be a good translator.
At the time I preferred to record my translations on the so-called Dictaphone, to highlight sentences or terms that I needed to check, and to use my terminology cards for further research when I received the typed text for revision, proofreading or finalising.
From paper to screen
In the late eighties we received our first computers. Essentially, they were typewriters with a screen instead of paper, and corrections were easy to make, but, most importantly, they had a memory. We could store and retrieve our previous translations. Gradually we were also able to organise and digitalise our terminology cards, and to create tables with equivalents in many languages. We could update our entries when a term was approved by the terminology groups formed jointly with the other Institutions.
Cooperation in terminology became crucial because of the constantly increasing number of texts not only in the European Institutions, but also worldwide due to globalisation that called for enhanced multilingual cooperation. Thus, sharing terminology became very important for ensuring linguistic consistency, and it was made feasible by the development of information technology. Besides sharing the stored resources that we started to call ‘data’, and creating digital databases instead of printed glossaries (e.g. Eurodicautom of the European Commission), another service of the digital era contributed to the evolution of terminology management: interactive collaboration.
Interactive cooperation and resource sharing
At the very beginning of the new century, the EU decided to merge all its digital databases into an interactive one, accessible to all participating Institutions and enabling interactive contributions by all their translators. We called it IATE, which stands for Inter-Active Terminology for Europe.
At the same time, the gradual creation of a common multilingual space for international cooperation in science and industry made consistent terminology an essential tool for the global strategies of big companies, or for any other international project in every institutional, academic, commercial or industrial field of cooperation. Every international organisation created a multilingual database with the terminology used in and for its decisions and rules, every company compiled a multilingual digital glossary with the terms used in product information and company internal communication. Every university produced terminology databases, either as a linguistic research exercise, or to support multilingual international academic cooperation in all fields, be it scientific, legal, medical, financial, technical or any other domain.
This development created a new need – the need for interoperability, which helps to avoid the overlapping of terminology research, to prevent the use of discrepant terms for the same concepts, and to give access to the terminology offered by the specialists in each field. Every year the evolution of technology offered new possibilities for common terminology repositories and platforms: from metasearch to communication and collaborative platforms, to the cloud and the interactive social media services.
The human and the machine, a new relationship
In parallel, the vertiginous increase of translation needs created software such as computer-assisted translation incorporating the use of translation memories and terminology data, automatic term extraction based on both statistical and linguistic criteria, the extraction of terminology in formats allowing the creation of personalised, field-focused and text-related databases by each translator in today’s market.
Good translators still need to be good terminologists, but at the same time they have to apply new methods to be sure of finding and using the most reliable terminology. Today we need less linguistic research, and much more electronic research. We have to use our linguistic knowledge more as a filter to choose the reliable term among the existing data rather than to coin ourselves the right term while translating. And this human linguistic knowledge will always serve to guarantee the quality of the translation, not only for the drafting style, but also for filtering and making the right choice of available terminology.
The new profile of the terminologist
Nowadays a good terminologist doesn’t need to be a good translator. The evolution of terminology created some new jobs: the computational linguist, the localiser, the terminologist. The required skills do not necessarily include the aptitude for translating; instead, one must be able to monitor the web using all the relevant tools such as alerts, subscribing to specialised sites, mastering social media management, joining specialised groups, lists and discussions on Facebook, twitter and Linked-in, as well as using other media channels like electronic newspapers (e.g. paper.li) or web-monitoring programs (e.g.scoop.it). It is essential to follow and actively use a variety of linguistic tools, portals and search engines related to terminology, ontology, localisation, neology, translation and interpretation. The up-to-date terminologist has to know how to stay informed about the new features of term extractors, CAT-tools and machine translation, and to use all this information to create technically perfect and linguistically reliable entries in electronic termbases or glossaries following established standards, such as the terminology ISO, IATE handbook and other style guides published by international organisations and university departments dealing with terminology.
This advanced use of terminology has promoted it to the status of a separate scientific discipline. It is present in the curricula of most universities worldwide, not only in linguistic faculties but also in every domain of studies. Terminology is a frequent choice for targeted postgraduate studies and theses, and it also provides the methodology for analysing and organising the semantic web, structuring big data, and streamlining philosophical thinking through the ontologies that connect related concepts. Thus we can say that terminology studies provide a new way of thinking and dealing with the semantic web. At the same time multilingual terminology repositories make it possible search for any activity, offer, or job opportunity, since tagging links you with every web page related to your research in all countries where the languages of your query are spoken.
In order to provide high quality translation, a translator needs to know how to make efficient use of terminology and CAT-tools, how to extract and download terminology to create termbases related to the text, how to filter it according to the target audience while taking into account different types of language used in legislation, administration, journalism, finance etc., using methods of sentiment analysis, and dealing with a variety of fields, for instance, specialised medical literature intended for doctors, or texts on public health for the common user.
When I remember my boxes with my hand-written terminology cards…
Written by Rodolfo Maslias, Head of the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament
Post edited by:
Yelena Radley, Terminology Trainee at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament
Clara Gorría Lázaro, Terminology Trainee at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament
and Katerina Palamioti, Translator, Social Media and Content Manager, Communication Trainee and Foodie at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament.