Terminology without Borders is a project of the Terminology Coordination Unit (TermCoord) of the European Parliament aiming at enhancing communication in many different domains of the human activity. This aim is achieved through several multilingual projects consisting in the creation of glossaries, which contain precise terminology in as many European and non-European languages as possible.
The second objective of Terminology without Borders is to gather Universities with terminology and translation specialisation courses in order to create a wide network of partnerships with young professionals who collaborate with each another and with TermCoord for the same common aim. This is to spread the importance of terminology among young people and around the world and to raise awareness on terminology’s influence on the quality of translations.
Terminology without Borders currently has ten domains, including Culture (YourTerm CULT). Each domain contains several more specific sub-domains. The TermCoord team has now decided to create within the Culture domain a new sub-domain involving Music, with particular focus on Musical Instruments.
Music is indeed a central discipline and branch of Culture and it is part of people’s lives in a constant and unconscious way. It is a very dynamic, ever-changing topic, as there are more and more singers and new genres, which is why its terminology is constantly expanding and developing. Musical traditions in different cultures are of great variety and we can observe many interesting linguistic phenomena concerning this field.
The implementers of this new sub-domain have collected texts in the English language concerning music and musical instruments. Through the use of Sketch Engine, they have created a corpus gathering the selected documents, and extracted its terminology. There were hundreds of results revealed by the automatic terminology extraction, and after a manual selection of the relevant terms and the exclusion of the non-relevant ones, a list of 228 English terms in the music field was finalised. The terms were then uploaded in a new dedicated glossary, which is now waiting to be filled with other languages.
If you are interested in adding your languages in this new sub-project, click here and submit a collaboration request form!
Written by Toffee Eleni Vanelli
Born in Cyprus in 1997 and living in Italy since 2002, Toffee’s bi-cultural background has determined the development of her interest in the world’s linguistic and cultural differences, which she enhanced by choosing a linguistic-based career path. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Mediation (University of Udine) and a Master’s degree in Modern Languages for Communication and International Cooperation (University of Padua); she fluently speaks Italian, English and French, and she also knows Greek, German and Spanish. Toffee has engaged in Specialized Translation and Terminology. Especially during her Master’s degree, she has deepened her knowledge, competences and interests in the world of Terminology and the European Union law. She participated in numerous (inter)national Translation and Terminology projects, such as the European Terminology without Borders project in 2020 and 2021.