Claudia Lecci is graduated in Specialised Translation and Translation for the Publishing Industry at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (now Department of Interpreting and Translation – DIT). She currently coordinates the MA modules “Technologies and Methods for Translation”, “Technologies and Methods for Interpreting” and “Computer-assisted Translation from English into Italian”. She also follows the activities of the Laboratory for Terminology and Computer-Assisted Translation (DIT, Forlì Campus). She is an SDL Trados Authorised Trainer for SDL Trados Studio and SDL MultiTerm.
- You are a lecturer at the University of Bologna, Department of Interpreting and Translation of the School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Interpreting and Translation (formerly the SSLMIT) on the Forli campus. Tell us about your work and what you do.
I coordinate three courses in the Department of Interpreting and Translation: a Translation Technologies and Methods course for the Master’s degree in Specialist Translation, an Interpreting Technologies and Methods course for the Master’s degree in Interpreting and a translation course (computer-assisted) from English into Italian for the three-year Intercultural Linguistic Mediation course.
I am also in charge of some of the activities of the Laboratory for Terminology and Computer-Assisted Translation, including the management of curriculum internship and training for students, relations with local authorities, international organisations and the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Union and the organisation of training workshops on SDL Trados Studio (as a certified SDL Trados trainer).
- Why has a terminology course specifically for interpreting students been set up?
The need to set up a course in terminology specifically for interpreting students stemmed from the substantial difference between the profession of interpreter and that of translator and the different terminological needs of both professions, due to the very nature of oral discourse which calls for different methods of preparation and consultation of terminology resources within a different time frame.
The study and use of terminology by an interpreter is split into two stages:
- the preparation stage before the conference, for which varying amounts of time may be available; this stage consists of a detailed analysis of the relevant domain, the extraction of terminology, identifying how the terms relate to each other and cataloguing them into terminology resources, first in one language and then in the second language;
- the actual use of the terminology directly in the interpreting booth, which requires immediacy and speed in consulting the previously created resources.
In addition, interpreters should also be familiar with ‘genre terminology’, namely linguistic features that belong to everyday language and can appear in any kind of oral text regardless of the type of specialist content. Interpreters must acquire this terminology and be able to manage it automatically in language 1 and language 2, in order to focus all their efforts on finding the terminology for the specialist field. ‘Generic terminology’ was established in 2011 at the former SSLMIT in Forlì following a study conducted by a group of lecturers. It then became an integral part of the Terminology for Interpreters module (part of the former Interpreting Technologies and Methods course – details below). Hence the need to differentiate the courses available in order to meet the training requirements of future professional interpreters.
- How is the course structured?
Up until the last academic year, students attended an integrated course consisting of two modules of 40 hours each, one in the first half of the year and the other in the second half of the first year.
In the first semester the ‘Terminology for Interpreters’ module was held. This module looked in detail at the concept of generic terminology and students were given the tools to extract it in several working languages. This was followed by domain terminology, with one part providing documentation on a given specialist domain which called for online research and the creation of corpora, and another part that involved extracting, systematising and cataloguing terminology in language 1 and language 2, with the help of dedicated open-source or commercial tools.
In the second semester the ‘Technology for Interpreting’ module was held. This introduced students to, and taught them to use, speech recognition software, which is used to produce subtitles in real time (mainly for the hearing impaired). This is a technique that requires many of the skills of an interpreter, as it is based on intra- and inter-linguistic respeaking. This module also included an introduction to audio description and video remote interpreting.
Starting from this academic year, however, the integrated course has been divided into two individual annual courses – Interpreting Technologies and Methods 1 and Interpreting Technologies and Methods 2, to be held respectively in the first and second year of the course.
This decision was made for a number of reasons, including the fact that students in previous years had expressed the need to study terminology in the second year, too, in order to be able to better develop their terminology knowledge and skills and to incorporate them as much as possible into their interpreting courses.
This means that students can be taught at a better pace and documentation and terminology can be interspersed with technology ‘titbits’ such as the above-mentioned speech recognition to produce subtitles in real time, audio description and video remote interpreting, with the addition of telephone interpreting, which is used increasingly in the interpreting world.
- In your view, does the use of terminology resources improve the work of interpreters? If so, how?
In my opinion, good interpreting is impossible without the correct use of terminology, which is one of the core criteria for assessing the quality of an interpreter’s work. Using a correct interlinguistic equivalent that is appropriate to the situation means that target-language recipients can have access to information that is accurate and have a full and relevant understanding of what the speaker is saying.
A properly trained interpreter who can master specialist terminology and who is thus in possession of a full set of consistent terminology resources is able to provide an effortless high-level service without resorting to ‘tricks of the trade’ that would lower the quality of the service.
- What technological tools are available to interpreters?
Interpreters who want to gather information about a particular field and extract specialist terminology have a number of options. They can, for example, create corpora from the internet in a semi-automatic manner by using the open-source tool BootCat, which was developed at our former SSLMIT, and then extract the terminology through a concordancer such as AntConc. The terms extracted can then be catalogued in various ways:
- in the form of glossaries (in Excel, Word, etc.), which can be consulted in the booth using the Interplex tool;
- in the form of terminology databases, which enable interpreters to create terminology entries containing fields (contexts, definitions, conceptual systems, etc.), which are useful at the preparatory stage, i.e. when the interpreter is studying the domain.
A tool that combines all these functions is InterpretBank, software that was developed by Claudio Fantinuoli at the University of Mainz and was specifically created for conference interpreters. With InterpretBank you can create glossaries (here, too, you can insert fields), store them and then consult them in the interpreting booth, through a special mode – Conference Mode. In addition, by incorporating it into the TranslatorBank suite you can also create specialist corpora from which to extract the terminology that will later be inserted into the glossaries.
- In your work do you use the resources made available by the European Union, such as the terminology database IATE?
The language resources made available by the European Union are very important to interpreting students as they provide a rich and reliable back-up which they can draw on to seek solutions to any linguistic doubts they might have when reviewing terminology in preparation for a conference.
The presentation of the EU language resources available on the internet is the subject of one of the first lessons of the technology courses for interpreters (as well as those for translators or language mediators), as it gives them some idea on how to search for language resources on institutional websites.
In addition to the terminology database IATE, we also present the numerous terminological resources made available by the REI Italian language network (thematic glossaries, lexicons, dictionaries, etc.) and Eur-Lex, with its multilingual search option, is always a very valuable tool.
- Why did you decide to work with terminology?
My interest in terminology developed during my five years of study at the former SSLMIT, when I came into contact first with the world of language mediation and later, in greater depth, with translation. My years of study and internships at translation agencies and with local authorities helped me to become aware of how important terminology is in intralingual and interlingual communication (both written and oral). I loved the field so much that I decided to study it further even after graduating and started working straight away with the Laboratory for Terminology and Computer-Assisted Translation, which was managed by Professor Franco Bertaccini at the time, and continued to follow their work over the years.
- In your opinion, is terminology considered a real discipline?
Yes, terminology as a discipline was developed as early as the second half of the 20th century, when Eugen Wüster, an Austrian engineer who was passionate about language, began to work on terms as elements of vocabulary that were univocal and unambiguous and were supposed to ensure effective communication.
Over the years, terminology has become increasingly consolidated and has established itself as a discipline that deals with the study of terms, i.e. of lexical units that enable specialist knowledge to be transferred into one or more languages.
- Is any academic research done in the field of terminology?
Terminology has been and is the subject of academic research, both in Italy and overseas, since its inception as a scientific discipline. The great Gambier, Gaudin and Sager wrote of terminology from the outset and today there are many academics doing research in the field. To name but a few: Maria Teresa Cabré, founder of the University Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona; Gerhard Budin, University of Vienna; Maria Teresa Zanola, Chair of the Pan-Latin Terminology Network (REALITER) and of the Italian Association for Terminology (Ass.I.Term); Franco Bertaccini, founder of the Laboratory for Terminology and Computer-Assisted Translation of the Department of Interpreting and Translation at the University of Bologna, Forlì campus; Donatella Pulitano, University of Geneva, and many others.
- What changes have you noticed in recent years regarding use of terminology? What trends do you expect to see in the future?
With the consolidation of related disciplines, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT), terminology – and even more so terminography, namely the systematic collection of terms that make up specialist languages – is increasingly becoming an integral part of the workflow of professional translators, who create and maintain terminology databases to incorporate them into CAT or MT tools.
Similarly, professional interpreters work with terminology and terminography not only to establish their own set of terminology resources that are useful for interpreting both at the preparatory stage and later on, in the booth, but also to integrate them with other similar jobs they do. One example is the above-mentioned respeaking and voice recognition for the production of subtitles in real time, which is done through Dragon Naturally Speaking, a tool that allows vocabulary to be expanded by inserting specialist corpora or lists of previously selected terms, according to the subject in question.
In my view, therefore, in future, there will be an increasing trend towards integrating terminology with similar disciplines.
Interviewer: Antonella Nardella
Born and raised by Italian parents in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), Antonella grew up in a bilingual environment. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Intercultural and Linguistic Mediation from the School of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Interpreting and Translation in Forlì (Bologna). During her Bachelor she studied for one year in the UK as an Erasmus student at University College London. Currently she is enrolled in the Master’s Conference Interpreting at the University of Bologna in Forlì. During her Master she spent yet another semester abroad in Germany at the University of Heidelberg thanks to a second Erasmus exchange. At the moment she is writing her thesis on Terminology in the asylum/asylum law domain and is doing a study visit at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament’s Directorate General for Translation in Luxembourg to carry out research for her thesis. Apart from her passion for terminology she loves to travel and to explore new languages and cultures.