The Terminology Without Borders project of the Terminology Coordination Unit reflects and supports the goal of the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD) to communicate with citizens using clear language. TermCoord launched this project in collaboration with EU and UN Agencies, as well as international organisations. However, one of the most important collaborations is with universities, whose participation greatly helps to enrich the terminology database.
Over the last few weeks, TermCoord has held a series of meetings with different universities around the world in order to organise the upcoming projects for the new academic year. These meetings were organised by the Head of the TermCoord Unit, Rodolfo Maslias, Nadezhda Krasteva-Schaefer and the two new coordinators of the terminology projects, Sofia Bertini and Laia Pérez Picó, along with the university professors and students.
On October 18, the Professors Łucja Biel and Anna Jopek-Bosiacka from the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw visited the European Parliament in Luxembourg and the offices of the Terminology Coordination Unit. They got to know all of the members of the team. During the meeting, the coordinators gave a general presentation of TermCoord projects in which students can participate, such as Terminology without Borders and the TermCoord website. A general presentation was also given on the latest developments in IATE.
On October 26, TermCoord had a meeting with Professor Pascale Elbaz and her students from the ISIT Paris. After the general presentation of Terminology without Borders, they started working on the Natural Language Processing (NLP) sub-project, within the TECH project. Students will work on some of the terms in the existing glossary, but they will also extract new terms from corpora and include them in the Excel tables. In order to carry out the terminology work this semester, collaborators will use an Excel table, which was updated on the basis of the FAIRterm Web Application.
TermCoord had an online meeting with the Hellenic American University of Athens on November 8 with Professors Roulia Ifigeneia and Romaios Petros. During this meeting TermCoord gave a general presentation of EU Terminology, IATE, TermCoord and Terminology without Borders. The same day, TermCoord gave a presentation to students from University of Trieste, answering students’ questions related to the terminology projects.
On November 9, we had the pleasure to discuss with Tinatin Margalitadze about future collaborations with students from the Ilia State University ISU of Tbilisi, Georgia. We discussed the different ways in which students can participate in the Terminology without Borders’ project and about the project of her PhD student, Nata Chkhaidze. She created a bilingual sub-corpus of psychiatric texts, uploaded them to the “English-Georgian Parallel Corpus” platform of the ISU, and generated a bilingual glossary of terms. Nata will start working in the domain of MED, sub-domain Disorders.
Written by Laia Pérez Picó
Born in Alicante, Spain, Laia holds a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting. She had the opportunity to study abroad in Canada and France thanks to different mobility programs. She also holds a Master’s degree in Institutional Translation at the University of Alicante and a second Master’s degree in Translation Technologies with an specialisation in Terminology at the University of Geneva.