During AsLing’s 44th Translating and the Computer conference (TC44) on November 24, TermCoord was represented by its Head of Unit, Rodolfo Maslias, who chaired a panel discussion “YourTerm: A Collaborative & FAIR European Project”. Federica Vezzani and Giorgio Di Nunzio, professors at the University of Padua, presented the new updates of FAIRterm, a free tool for the compilation of multilingual terminological records.
FAIRterm has been designed to support the work of language professionals such as terminologists, translators, technical writers, researchers, and students. The tool has been implemented according to the ISO TC/37 SC/3 standards and it currently supports the 24 official European languages, plus Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Arabic and Georgian. Within the Terminology without Borders project, TermCoord recommends the use of the FAIRterm tool for the compilation of multilingual terminological records by the partners collaborating in the project.
The new interface of the tool was presented during the AsLing conference. It allows a group of people to work collaboratively on the same terminological records. In 2021, the University of Padua (UNIPD), together with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), the Institute of Intercultural Management and Communication (ISIT) of Paris, and TermCoord cooperated for the design, implementation, and testing of a collaborative multilingual terminological management system (TMS), to support the work of the terminologists in each sub-project. Master’s students from AUTH and ISIT had the opportunity to work collaboratively, in three different languages (English, French, Greek), in the TECH domain, focusing in the Natural Language Processing subproject. For this terminology work, the students built ad hoc corpora, extracted terms, found definitions and contexts, consulted an expert of the domain and finally stored all terminological entries in the new collaborative TMS.
Rodolfo Maslias, Federica Vezzani and Giorgio Di Nunzio, together with professors Pascale Elbaz (ISIT) and Elpida Loupaki (AUTH) discussed the challenges of this project from both technical and pedagogical perspectives. During the meeting, the experts examined the degree of reliability of terms produced within a collaborative platform and examined the possibilities of integrating the FAIRterm resource in CAT tools and in Computer Assisted Interpreting tools. Moreover, they looked into the relevant factors that come into play when coordinating a collaborative project in an academic environment and how students react to a new tool in a UX design perspective.
Written by: Sofia Bertini
