Framing Women’s Rights for Terminology without Borders

2523

 

This is the second article in a series of articles on the latest developments in Terminology without Borders, which has its origins in YourTerm MED. This was the initial project on medical terminology to be set up in cooperation with Translators without Borders (TWB) and participating universities. In September 2018, during a visit to the University of Vigo in Spain, TermCoord decided to apply this framework to other subject areas of interest, such as fisheries, (YourTerm MARE), education (YourTerm EDU) and women’s rights (YourTerm FEM).

This update describes our progress in building an event frame for YourTerm FEM thanks to the work of Dr Olga Koreneva at the Pablo de Olavide University in Spain and current TermCoord trainee Julia Pagès from the Paris Diderot University, a participating institution in YourTerm MED. As an application of Frame-based terminology, the YourTerm FEM event frame is based on earlier research conducted by former TermCoord trainees Dr Olga Koreneva and María Isabel Bolívar Pérez, both members of the LexiCon research group at the University of Granada.

Following an analysis of a corpus on women’s rights and a terminology extraction, Olga and Julia constructed successfully the conceptual scaffolding for the women’s rights and protection domain. Every concept in this domain falls within a set of prototypical categories, which are connected by a set of prototypical semantic relations. This event can therefore be described as an AGENT (institution) who protects a PATIENT (woman) at a given LOCATION (work place, home) from violence (PROCESS) by promoting or implementing various measures contained in an INSTRUMENTAL TEMPLATE (see figure below). In addition, this event frame allows us to consider conceptual multidimensionality since the same concept can play the role of patient or agent in a different context: AGENT (institution) protects women (PATIENT/AGENT) promotes measures (PATIENT/PROCESS), etc.

 

Graphical representation of the women’s rights and protection event.

 

Based on this conceptual structure, Julia has also designed an initial database for YourTerm FEM with 70 terms in our anchor languages: English, French and Spanish. The next stage is to distribute these terms to participating universities.

As can be seen, terminology in YourTerm FEM is organised according to a cognitive event structure. Not only does this guarantee effective terminology management, but it also accelerates user knowledge retrieval from specialised knowledge bases. Our idea is to apply the latest findings in the fields of Cognitive Sciences and Cognitive Terminology to other subject areas. Given that this is evidently thematically constrained, more research efforts will be needed for current and future projects at Terminology without Borders.


Written by Dr Olga Koreneva and Julia Pagès

Olga holds a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Granada and is member of the LexiCon research group of this university. She has been working as a professional linguist and a terminologist for many years and completed a traineeship at TermCoord in 2018. Olga finished her PhD in 2017 with a thesis in Cognitive Terminology and Psychoterminology. Her working languages are Russian, German, Spanish, English, Italian and Portuguese. Currently, she is working as an associate professor at the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain.

Julia holds a Master’s Degree in Translation (EN/ES/FR>ES/FR) from the Paris Diderot University. Her Master’s thesis was a translation and terminology project on Deep Neural Networks in the field of cosmography. She has previously worked as a translator and project manager in the medical imaging field and as a freelance translator. She is now taking a Master’s degree in Corpus Linguistics and is working on a medical terminology thesis that addresses the phenomenon of diastratic variation in diabetes terminology.