As students of the Department of Translation, School of French Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in the context of our Thesis on terminological research, we had the opportunity to collaborate with the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament (TermCoord), within the framework of the YourTerm program.
To carry out our work, we chose the topic module on education (YourTerm EDU), and more specifically on intercultural education. The reason why we proceeded with this choice is that in today’s world the phenomenon of multiculturalism is observed worldwide. Moreover, after research in the field of higher education, it was observed that there is not a wide range of Greek linguistic resources concerning higher education and/or emphasizing the part of interculturality, except for the European Union glossary. Consequently, young people in higher education, as well as the respective teaching staff, do not have the opportunity to be fully informed about intercultural education, the possibilities offered by the European education programs and to realize the value and importance of a modern intercultural education. For these reasons, we felt it necessary to enrich YourTerm terminology base to provide the best possible information to those who wish to explore this field.
The methodology we used consisted of the following stages: First, we worked on a terminology base created by the Institute of Intercultural Management and Communication (ISIT) in Paris on Intercultural Education. In this database there were a total of 110 terms, divided into different subcategories, related to the specific topic and available in 4 languages (French, English, Italian, Spanish). At this point, after a thorough research in scientific texts, articles and dictionaries, we managed not only to find the corresponding terms and definitions in Greek, but also to add to them another 60 Greek terms that we considered necessary for the specific topic. An important role was also played by TermCoord, which provided us with a number of textual resources and access to the European Terminology Database IATE. Our aim was therefore to produce Greek terminology and to search for definitions related to inter-university agreements and European programmes in higher education.
In summary, through this research process we realized that the terminology project is a challenge for students who wish to broaden their research scope and provides them with many benefits. In this case, we understood the theory and practice of terminology with the help of TermCoord, IATE, and YourTerm, learned to use some tools used in terminology work such as Sketchengine, and understood the process of creating corpora and extracting terms. Finally, observing, or emerging new questions and perspectives can pave the way for new research areas as well as can provide opportunities for deeper research and facilitate communication between experts.
Students involved in this project:
Kalliopi Chatzidimitriou & Aspasia Tsatsaroni
Supervisor:
Elpida Loupaki, Assistant Professor