Worldwide there is a general attempt to adapt the studies to the occupational situation on the markets, more precisely to offer to the students the skills that would allow them to find a job more easily. This seems generally a good idea if you consider the very high numbers of unemployed young and less young people with numerous higher education diplomas.
The problem is that the orientation of the economy towards a philosophy based only on the cost and benefit aspect decreases very much the importance given to humanistic studies, with probably very bad consequences for the way of thinking of the next generations and for the level of general and theoretical knowledge.
Although languages are very important in a more and more globalised economy and communication, all studies related to languages are treated as humanistic and thus less relevant not to say redundant.
It is true that due to the globalised multilingual communication and commerce, the offer of highly skilled human resources as regards multilingualism has increased and the competition is very tough in the purely linguistic professions, especially if the only strength of the candidate is the knowledge of languages.
This situation affects very much our linguistic professions. Language studies are suffering important budgetary cuts in all countries, the progress of English as a lingua franca is lowering the translation but even more the interpretation needs, and consequently the price of linguistic services. Moreover the quick evolution of automation makes studies and our profession less and less attractive.
Computational linguistics offers in this context a lot of opportunities for jobs or posts in the industrial and academic research. But these are rather jobs for informaticians. They try to introduce linguistic aspects into their development work. A very indicative example is the development of term extractors, software combining a statistical and a linguistic approach. Usually the statistical aspects are very well designed, but the users, the terminology and translation services and companies have big difficulties in explaining the linguistic needs to the developers.
But terminology is a choice for a specialisation that will open more and more doors in the market. For three main reasons: 1) in the evolving automation it will be the one and only guarantee of the quality and consistency of translations; 2) the immensely growing big data environment will need an organisation of the huge and contradictory terminological information searchable through meta search engines; 3) the biggest companies develop huge terminology coordination services to cover the needs of their multilingual clientele.
TermCoord, the Terminology Coordination Service of the European Parliament, has been very proud for having provoked an interest in terminology among 1) some of the hundreds of translation trainees of the European Parliament by having inserted a compulsory terminology project in their traineeship programme, 2) some of the students of the Master in learning and communication in multilingual and multicultural contexts of the University of Luxembourg, who followed a module on terminology taught by us and then did a one-month internship at TermCoord, and 3) among some university lecturers who paid a study visit to TermCoord and then worked with their students on terminology projects the results of which are entered into the EU terminology database IATE.
But what are the possibilities, where can you get information on terminology, where can you consult the databases? And then where can you really specialise in this domain, which universities have such departments and which countries are the strongest in this field? Are there any masters, diplomas, certifications? Commercial or academic ones; any on-line webinars? And what about the job opportunities? Which companies have terminology departments? Or networks in countries where they sell their products, coordinated by central teams? Which technical companies need terminologists to consult them on the linguistic aspects of the software they produce? And how about the international and multilingual institutions? The EU, the UN and many others and also governments of multilingual countries, Canada, Switzerland…. Do they offer posts and where can you apply? And if no well-paid posts for life are available, are there any traineeships or scholarships? Are there any conferences, where you can be informed on the evolution in terminology?
We receive many similar questions from our readers and followers through our social media accounts. Therefore we feel obliged as the terminology unit of a big European Institution elected and serving the citizens, to provide information and resources that can help our young linguist colleagues to find perhaps a new way to the professional success in our profession. We shall soon gather the information we can find in a single page of our website directly related to the labour market opportunities regarding terminology.
Rodolfo Maslias
Head of the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament