Last Thursday IMOT broke an all time record for most views to my blog in one day after I published “10 reasons to vote for my blog” (very promising!) and also a record of 40 new subscribers in less than one week!

So, I wanted to write a short note to welcome the new subscribers and also thank all of you in general for your interest and continued support.

I would usually post stats by mid and end year, but I thought it would be interesting to share a few stats from WordPress, so that my newbies could make sure they were not missing out on the good stuff! I initially planned on sharing only first places, but then I thought you would be curious to know who placed second. So here they are:

1. Most popular blog post ever! The Semantic Triangle: Words don’t mean, people mean. Second place: Onomasiological and semasiological approaches (both from the series of SmarTerms)
2. Most popular post on termbases: A termbase, what you should know. Second place: Termbases: It’s not about the terms (The concept-oriented approach)
3. Most popular page: Terminology 101, that now includes the terminology course with a collection of my most relevant blog posts. Second place: Readings in Terminology
4. Most popular biography: Ferdinand de Saussure, not too far away from Eugen Wüster
5. Most popular tool: AntConc, also very close to T-Manager
6. Most popular project management post: Writing your terminology project goals. Second place: The Triple constraint of terminology projects
7. Most popular interview: Rodolfo Maslias, Director of TermCoord, along with terminologist Uwe Muegge.
8. Most popular organization: The European Association For Terminology (EAFT), followed by the Pan-Latin Terminology Network (REALITER) and its multilingual glossaries
9. Most popular guest post: Terminology and naming by Jordi García Soler, only one view above second place: How scientific terminology can change our perception of life by Yolanda Gómez
10. Most popular infographic: The birth of Terminology (the first steps) and second place was for From toddler to teen.
11. Most popular blog post on resources: Conversion tools and difference checkers for language lovers. Second place: Readings, tools, and useful links for corpus analysis
12. Most popular external resources by IMOT: Delicious page on terminology. Followed by my terminology Padlet

I have to say it’s hard to decide what’s my favorite, but I think IMOT will be breaking records soon again with my recent terminology course that I’m sure will become a fixture on Terminology 101. And remember that I have resources in Spanish, French, and Portuguese (By the way, the Spanish resources got first place for most visited page for resources in other languages).

Just as a fun fact, I’m always interested in looking at the words used for general searches in my blog to see what people are interested in, and I have to say the person who looked for “how to write names in Japanese” gets first place in originality. So maybe I should start writing a section in Japanese. LOL

Share the Terminology love!

The post My most popular blog posts on terminology (Did you miss it?) appeared first on In My Own Terms.

This workshop is part of their online Master’s Program in Terminology, but may be taken as an individual course. It starts on June 8th and finishes on July 26. Below you will find some general information, but visit their page by clicking here for more details.

“Workshop IV: Neology supplements the courses offered in the online Terminology programme. Neology is a field of knowledge which addresses the detection and analysis of linguistic innovations, focusing especially on lexical units. Lexical change is inherent to any living language; nonetheless, in recent years, the production of neologisms has intensified owing to the massive proliferation of new knowledge, objects and technologies, with the resulting need to update the lexicons of languages. This workshop will include exercises related to the concepts of neology and specialised neology, and the neological needs of translation and language planning in minority languages will be studied.”

The post Workshop on Neology (IULA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra) appeared first on In My Own Terms.

Click here to learn more

I recently was approached by the developer of this new mutilingual database (company based in Ireland) and since I work at a bank I thought I’d give it a try and so far so good. You have a 3-month free subscription, so you can sign in and try it before buying. Check it out: http://www.linguafin.com. According to their website, it includes:

• 20+ languages
• Approx 750,000 terms in English
• Between 4,000 and 90,000+ terms in non-English languages
• At least 10,000 term pairs in twelve languages
• At least 20,000 term pairs in ten languages
• At least 30,000 term pairs in eight languages
• Terms covering all financial areas (accounting, banking, insurance stock-broking, commodities, financial related legal terms, investment, taxation, savings and pensions)
• Complete financial terms (e.g. net income available to common shareholders or total current assets) as well as individual words (e.g. depreciation)
• Alternative terms
• Alternative search terms
• Capacity to collect terms in real-time from users that have been looked for and were not available, so these can be added promptly
• Provision for additional features e.g generic, tax and regulatory definitions of terms to be added as product enhancements or new products later
• Language variations e.g. Chinese (traditional and simplified), Portugese (Brazilian and European), French (European & Canadian), Spanish (various), German (German, Swiss, Austrian) etc.
• All available local GAAP terminology language pairs (approx 5,000 terms each)

Happy searching!

The post Linguafin: A new financial database for translators appeared first on In My Own Terms.

You probably already know TermCoord’s “Why is Terminology Your Passion”, a collection of interviews of terminologists who talk about their experience with Terminology and terminology management. So here are a few quotes taken from the first collection. Of course, my advice is that you read all the interviews. Read Part II here.

1. “An excessive “technologisation” [ ] can cause us to forget the theoretical and methodological basis of terminology and concentrate exclusively on the technical aspects of terminological tools and applications… It’s important that the translator not only uses [ ] tools, but is also familiar with the basic principles of terminology and applies them to translation work.” Lucía Candelaria Mesa Socas
2. “Terminology is the spine of a document during its life cycle and in professional communication in general. Furthermore, terminology is of vital importance for brand consistency and customer satisfaction in business. According to recent surveys, terminology inconsistency is the main challenge in the translation and localization industry, and translation and terminology project managers should pay attention to this at the very first stage of a document life cycle.” Tatiana Gornostay
3. “…in order to become a reliable terminologist, a person mainly should love knowledge and terminology as well as have a proficient knowledge of languages. She/he will have to study a specific subject field and become a specialist in it. They should study both the theory and application of terminology and all relevant ISO/TC 37 standards… He/she should digest terminological concepts and methods. Being a confident user of computer programs and other applications used in terminology today (word processing programs, terminological databases, etc.) is another requisite”. Kostas Valeontis
4. “Apart from having advanced linguistic and textual competences, a terminologist must know how to manage terminology: how to search and collect terms, how to store and retrieve them, how to manage monolingual and multilingual terminology and terminology projects. Moreover, a terminologist must know terminology strategies for business processes, if he/she works in companies which require translation, and be conscious of the relevance of terminological choices in institutional communication as well as in marketing needs” Maria Teresa Zanola
5. “Terminology work reveals a lot of positive effects for terminology management. A few examples: fewer errors in communication, cost reductions and time savings, better communication (availability of reference points, fewer debates and misunderstandings, better definitions), higher quality in authoring of the source text, fewer queries, improved quality, positive effects on translation, easier classification and better workflow in documentation procedures (retrievability and reusability).” Frieda Steurs
6. “Terminology management is part of a knowledge sharing workflow that helps achieve higher standardization and better quality, not only in translation but also in the source language, for example in the authoring of documentation.” “Technology has already changed translation and terminology management considerably, and it can only get better. Just to mention one example, further developments in corpus linguistics and related tools will have a great impact also on the work of individual terminologists and translators. Needless to say, getting the best out of tools will always rely on an adequate understanding of terminology management and of any related workflow, a further reason for promoting better terminology awareness.” Licia Corbolante
7. Advice for aspiring terminology managers: “be flexible; be open to innovation (tools, methods, data, etc.); network with others in the same profession as well as with others in your professional environments (incl. the social web); develop your personal professional profile, often in combination with other specialised domain-specific or generic skills and make it visible to the world; stay in touch with universities and research activities.” Gerard Budin
8. “But to become a good terminologist, one has to work very hard, have an organised mind, worship the power of words, never give up until one finds answers, be blessed with a mountain of patience and creative ideas, be an excellent communicator and have the wish and will to learn all one’s life. A translator becomes aware of the importance of terminology work and management only by translating lots of challenging documents from various subject fields. Invariably, the first impression seems to be: ‘Why should I “waste” my time and complicate my life with all this terminology stuff?’ Once you try to go through all the steps of managing your translation work as a project, including the terminology component becomes a natural must. Professional translators nowadays realise they can only get jobs and stay on the market if they deliver high quality services.” Giorgeta Ciubanu.
9. “One of the hardest things about terminology work is how little translators know about terminology. Even CAT tool developers are relatively uninformed as to the interaction between their software and its applications to the real job of translating. From the user’s perspective, translating is hard enough as it is without having to constantly hack your tools to try and get them to do what you want. Another thing that puzzles me is how many translators aren’t even aware of the fact that there are a number of very good dictionaries (both print and online) that would greatly assist them in their daily work. I feel strongly that investing a bit of time and money in learning about these possibilities pays dividends, but there is still a lot of educative work to be done in order to encourage people to take advantage of them.” Michael Beijer
10. “Even if translators are very often under time pressure, they should do terminology work following the concept-oriented approach. Otherwise the terminological data will be unsystematic and therefore unusable over time. Concept orientation does not mean that translators have to elaborate concept systems and have to supply every terminological entry with a definition; it requires (only) that all terminological information belonging to one concept should also be managed in one terminological entry. Synonyms should be stored in the same entry, homonyms in different entries.” Klaus-Dirk Schmitz

In my next post I will share a few more useful insights from the second collection of interviews. Stay tuned!

The post Wise Words: Insights from successful terminologists (Part I) appeared first on In My Own Terms.

Following up on my previous blog post (read Part I here) I present today some quotes from more terminologists (hard to pick!). Read the full interviews from these and more experts by accessing TermCoord’s second collection of interviews: Why is terminology your passion. I hope that after reading Part I and Part II, I have encouraged you to access both collections and read the interviews to find your favorite(s) and learn about how terminologists have come to work in and love terminology.

1. “Terminology work was the aspect of translation work that I most enjoyed. So, initially it was the thrill that goes along with confirming your hunches through research. My passion wasn’t so much focused on the linguistic aspects of ‘what should we call this thing in our native language.’ It was the understanding of the concepts and their relationships; and then how do we most easily make that knowledge accessible to others. And beyond the entries, how do you set up a system to optimize it for your users; what inputs do you need to achieve the right outputs for an environment.” Barbara Inge Karsch
2. “As regards terminologists’ personality and the soft skills they need, in my view the ability to work in a structured, systematic way is essential. In addition, terminologists need a good deal of determination and, at the same time, diplomatic skills, since they often face resistance from within the firms on whose behalf they are working.” Petra Drewer
3. “Neology is a phenomenon inherent to every natural language. All living languages are constantly adopting new words or lexical units, either in order to adapt to social, scientific and technological changes, or to express the same reality in a different way. Loanwords are one of the existing resources for lexical updating. However, the use of loanwords can have sociolinguistic consequences. The so-called ‘loss of domain’ in a language is simply the result of the large-scale adoption of loanwords, as such words present the sole possibility for expressing concepts in that domain.” Maria Teresa Cabré
4. “[ ] terminology has become so important in many lines of work (translation, computational linguistics, localisation, databases, etc.), so a basic understanding opens up career opportunities for students. [ ] the intellectual exercise of building databases, identifying ontologies, etc. equips students with intellectual competencies that are useful beyond the confines of terminology itself and helps them further develop their understanding of how the way we formulate things affects our social life and interactions. Examining how terminology evolves over time speaks volumes, for example, about social structures and processes.” Ingrid de Saint-Georges
5. “I am pleased to see that terminology is no longer the preserve of translators and people interested in languages and that many young people are starting to take an interest in terminology. More and more people are coming to recognise the importance of terminology in industry and in the economy as a whole and links are being established with knowledge management and related areas. Effective knowledge transfer and knowledge management are impossible without (clear) terminology. Terminology is everywhere, and in coming years we will have to pay more attention to the scientific background to terminology and to practical terminology work with a view to solving terminological problems and using the results in a variety of areas.” Petra Drewer
6. “I am convinced that terminologists could have a place in a great number of large businesses, both public and private, since the work of a terminologist is not confined to translation. It also involves compiling bilingual or multilingual glossaries and databases, documentary and terminological research and even scientific writing and the creation of ontologies.” Pascaline Dury
7. “I honestly think that the internet can support the survival of “smaller” languages. It makes a wide range of knowledge available to a lot of people. This can eventually foster the survival and success of languages. Even though people complain about the poor standard of language used on the Internet and in social media, the Internet has great potential as a tool for accessing the literature and terminology of minority languages. In my opinion, this unprecedented level of access to digital media can really help to counterbalance the dominance (real or perceived) of a few languages.” Danielle Henripin
8. “I do not think translation students are really aware of the role of terminology until they come up against terms needed for specialist translations, but there are those who, after reading in a general subject and in terminology management, are keen to specialise in it. I think students in other fields of study also become aware of terminology when they need it in their own language during their training and when they learn other languages for specific purposes, even though they may not know that terminology exists as a discipline.” Mercè Lorente Casafont
9. “There are sometimes “prejudices” about Terminology and the teachers’ role is to show students that there are close ties but not exclusive between terminology and translation: terminology is essential to any professional communication and it is not limited to an ancillary role for the translation.” Donatella Pulitano
10. “There is no term that is not tied to a concept. This means that terminology relies on two systems, a linguistic system and a conceptual one. The Artificial Intelligence field of ontology, developed in the context of knowledge engineering and defined as a formal definition of a conceptualisation, offers one of the most promising ways forward when it comes to representing conceptual systems. By providing a means for formulating explicit and computational representations of concepts, ontology can serve as a tool not only for operationalising terminology for IT applications, but also for focusing on concepts independently of language.” Christophe Roche
11. “Terminologists must be constant, consistent and curious professionals who are willing to learn about a wide range of issues they may not previously have been familiar with. They have to be systematic and organised, and not be afraid to use new technologies or to network. Above all, they have to love languages, and especially words.” Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez

Happy reading!

The post Wise Words: Insights from successful terminologists (Part II) appeared first on In My Own Terms.

So, here it is! Voting phase started today until June 6. So get your contacts together and share, share, share, and share some more! Social media, family, friends, pets, and aliens. Anyone can vote! Mine is the sixth going down on the right side. Here is the link:

http://en.bab.la/news/top-100-language-professional-blogs-2016-voting

Thank you! ¡Gracias! Obrigada! Grazie! Gràcies! Danke! Merci!

The post Vote for my blog! Voting phase starts today! appeared first on In My Own Terms.

When we deal with concepts, we also deal with terms in different forms. If we think of dictionaries, they put all concepts in one entry, while in a termbase we register each concept on separate term entries, a key difference between lexicography and terminology.

The terminologist carries out a ranking exercise, so to speak, in which s/he has to classify synonyms as “preferred”, “admitted”, or “deprecated” terms, making sure that they are all kept in a single entry to avoid doublettes. For example, which term should you use: shortcut key, hotkey, keyboard shortcut, access key, accelerator key, keyboard accelerator?

And if a termbase is well maintained, s/he might have to replace some of them with updated forms and register the previous form as “obsolete”. For example, at one point “periodontosis” was dropped in dentistry in favor of “periodontal disease”.

We may also have to deal with quasi-synonyms—terms with approximate meaning (disease/disorder, earthquake/earth tremor, speech-impared/stammerer). Therefore, careful analysis should be made to avoid confusion. In the words of Ariane Großjean, “terminology management must always aim at the unambiguous and clear use of terms or order to allow for a smooth communication. Thus, synonymy should be avoided in terminologies”.

A polysemic term has more than one meaning, i.e. different concepts are expressed by one term with different meanings but with the same etymological root. It is a very common occurrence in reterminologization (when a term adopts a new meaning, e.g., mouse-rodent and mouse-device) and it may lead to ambiguity if not clearly differentiated. Again, making sure that the term is registered separately when it has different meanings is key to avoid doublettes.

Identifying polysemy may be challenging if you don’t have sufficient technical knowledge or if you do not have access to the context. In the legal field, for example, “disposition” could have four different meanings (1) transferring something to another´s possession, (2) a final settlement of a case by court, (3) a provision in a statute, or (4) personal temperament of traits of character. Radek Vogel says that ambiguity may also arise when dealing with different coinages in British and American financial terminologies; for example, “own shares”, “debtors”, and “provisions” are the British equivalents for the American terms “Treasury stock”, “accounts receivable”, and “allowances”.

The message here is analyze and classify your terms following terminology principles to ensure consistency and avoid ambiguity. For a more extensive review of these and other forms of semantic relations of lexical units, I recommend taking a look at the sources below.

Sources and further reading:

Sevilla Muñoz Manuel. Semantic aspects of terms

Schmitz, Klaus-Dirk. Terms in texts and the challenge for terminology management.

Chromá, Marta. Synonymy and polysemy in legal terminology and their applications to bilingual and bijural translation

Großjean, Ariane, Corporate Terminology Management

Vogel, Radek. Synonymy and polysemy in accounting terminology: fighting to avoid inaccuracy.

Image source

The post Synonymy and polysemy in terminology appeared first on In My Own Terms.

While I was writing this blog post, my friend and subscriber, Simona Tigris (and PhD in Philology), reminded me about homophones in a comment on my post on synonymy and polysemy. I couldn’t agree more with her. I had thought about writing a separate blog post, but when we talk about doublettes, one of the main causes seems to be the mishandling of homophones. So, after reading this blog post, I also recommend you take some time to read the links below.

Doublettes (the technical terms for duplicate entries) are quite common unless you have an elephant’s memory. During a recent webinar, terminologist Barbara Inge Karsh mentioned that between 5%-10% of entries need adjusting during maintenance. In order to keep that percentage at a minimum, we should try to do an efficient job in the early stages of term entry creation by following terminological principles.

During terminology work we try to achieve univocity (one term, one concept) However, sometimes it’s not as easy as we think it is. Even if we follow terminology rules (no plurals, checking terms in upper/lower case, verbs in simple form, etc.), we won’t be able to remember each and every record what we have created.

So what do we do? Best to hear the advice from the expert. Barbara provides a few recommendations in one of her blog posts:

1. “Start out by specifying the subject field in your database. It will help you narrow down the concept for which you are about to create an entry. You might do a search on the subject field and see what concepts you defined at an earlier time. Sometimes that helps trigger your memory.
2. As you are narrowing down the subject field and take a quick glance through some of the existing definitions, you might identify and recognize an existing concept as the one you are about to work on.
3. Export your database into a spreadsheet program and do a quick QA on your entries. In a spreadsheet, such as Excel, you can sort each column. If there are true doublettes, you might have started the definition with the same superordinate, which, if you sort the entries, get lined up next to each other.
4. Maybe you don’t have time for QA, then I would simply wait until you notice while you are using your database and take care of it then. The damage in databases with lots of languages attached to a source language entry is bigger, but there are usually also more people working in the system, so errors are identified quickly. For the freelance translator, a doublette here and there is not as costly and it is also eliminated quickly once identified.”

In one of the comments in her blog post there is also an additional suggestion: When dealing with a large amount of entries, discuss possible nuances in definitions and terms with subject-matter experts.

I recommend reading her posts related to this topic:

1. Doublettes, such a pretty term, yet such a bad word, which provides more information, particular on dealing with homonyms and homographs.
2. How do I identify a term—confusability. How to deal with homographs
3. Avoiding doublettes or a report from the ISO meetings in Korea
4. Why doublettes are bad

Also, Rafael Guzman’s T-Manager (read my blog post about it here) is a tool that allows you to analyze Excel files before importing to a termbase and flags and deletes duplicates in a glossary. But if you are entering your terms directly to your termbase, better follow Barbara’s advice.

Image source

The post Having a dejà vu or are you seeing double? Dealing with doublettes appeared first on In My Own Terms.

I asked the winners of my recent raffle to send me a picture and a short bio when they got their respective books. Unfortunately, Olga Umaña’s s book (@OlgaUmanaC) got lost in the mail. We assume there’s someone at the post office who wants to study Terminology! In any case, since she is a university professor. I offered to send instead this terminology handbook (I recently shared this post about it) and she agreed. She finally received it this week. So, here is her story:

My name is Olga Umaña and I am from Manizales (Colombia). I have a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages (University of Caldas), and a Master’s degree in English Language Teaching (University of Caldas), and a Master’s degree in Translation Studies (Autónoma University of Manizales).

I have worked as a professor, researcher, thesis advisor, and translator. Together with my students, I have conducted recent research on topics such as translation sub-competencies, terminological competence, translating culturemes, identification and validation of neonyms, prototypicality effects of neonyms, scenes and frames of neonyms, and correspondence of Eventive Specialized Phraseological Units (eventive SPU), among others.

Aside from my research work, I have a translation and linguistic services agency (http://www.palabrasclave.com.co) supported by a group of professional translators and linguists.

In the picture, I am holding the book “A University Handbook on Terminology and Specialized Translation” by Noa Talaván Zanon. I was the lucky winner of the book raffle held to celebrate the second anniversary of the blog “In My Own Terms”. I will be happy to share it with my students and colleagues, as it is easy to read and has reference material on key issues of Terminology and Specialized Translation. I can also use it as didactic material thanks to the wide range of exercises it includes on different areas and to the simple, yet complete way to present topics. A valuable addition to our library.

I want to sincerely thank Patricia Brenes, not only for my wonderful book, but especially for sharing with Terminology students and scholars her constantly updated and rich blog. Warm hugs from Colombia!

The post Olga Umaña (Colombia), winner of the terminology book raffle appeared first on In My Own Terms.

1. Terminology Management—Why Would I Do That?

Barbara Inge Karsch is the presenter of this 60-minute webinar taking place next June 8. ATA member: $45. Non-member: $60

Description:

“Is there more to your job than the daily word chase for the best translation? Consider the long-term view instead: take time to systematically document those words today to improve the quality and speed of your translation in the future. Attend this webinar to find out more about using a terminology management system to increase the efficiency and accuracy of your translations. Plus learn how to build your own system to save, organize, and retrieve words, phrases, acronyms, synonyms, and abbreviations”

Click here for more info: http://www.atanet.org/webinars/ataWebinar153_terminology.php

2. Introduction to CAT tools and Terminology Management

The School of Professional Studies of New York University (NYU) offers this course by Prof. Carla Di Franco. It starts June 6 and lasts about two months (until August 13). Tuition is $725. You need to call them to register, as they do not take online registrations.

Description:

“Understand the basic concepts and components of CAT tools and terminology management using a few of the more common options available. Learn how to work with these technologies and processes more effectively, including dealing with internationalization issues that impact translators; handling a variety of file formats; building concept-oriented terminology lists; and understanding the effects that technologies, such as machine translation, have on translators in the industry today.”

Click here for more info: https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/courses/TRAN1-CE8008-introduction-to-cat-and-terminology-management.html

REMINDERS: Previously announced on this blog

3. SDL two last free webinars on terminology management

This was originally a series of four webinars, but there are still two more coming up, if you missed the other two taking place June 7 and June 13.

Click here for more info: http://www.sdl.com/cxc/language/terminology-management/terminology-webinar-series.html

4. Workshop on Neology

Universitat Pompeu Fabra. This workshop is part of their online Master’s Program in Terminology, but may be taken as an individual course. It starts on June 8th and finishes on July 26.

Click here for more info: http://eventum.upf.edu/event_detail/2337/sections/1806/workshop-iv_-neology.html

The post Upcoming terminology training events appeared first on In My Own Terms.

Just a friendly reminder to ask you to vote if you haven’t done so yet, or get another vote from a colleague or friend. Let’s see how we do this year. 

Remember, every vote counts! Monday is the cut-off date, but don’t delay. Remember time differences so the sooner the better. 

http://en.bab.la/news/top-100-language-professional-blogs-2016-voting

The post Last days to vote! appeared first on In My Own Terms.

TermCoord is hosting The European Association for Terminology (EAFT) Eight Terminology Summit to take place in Luxembourg, on November 14-15. It will be EAFT’s 20th anniversary and the summit’s title is “Visions and revisions”.

They also recently called for presentations. Here is the information in more detail:

• TermCoord’s official announcement.
• EAFT’s website
• Best terminology thesis award

Follow all the details in Twitter with the hashtag #EAFTSUMMIT2016.  I will definitively be attending, so send me a note in Contact Me to let me know if you are planning to attend.

Stay tuned!

The post EAFT Summit 2016: hosted by the European Parliament in Luxembourg appeared first on In My Own Terms.

Danae was the winner, along with Olga Umaña, of the book raffle that I recently ran on the occasion of IMOT’s second anniversary. I asked her to write a short bio to share with you. I really enjoyed reading it, and I´m sure you will too.

Danae Parmaki is an active translator and interpreter with an ever-growing love for languages since childhood: cried and moaned for running out of letters when learning her first alphabet. She is native Greek, adding new languages regularly, starting at the age of 4 with music, being the most widely understood one. After having read and partially memorised all children’s books in Greek from the local library, she requested learning English, at around 7 years old. By 11 she asked for French classes, at 15 she found Italian fascinating, adding up to Latin, while the love for Russian blossomed at the age of 16, excited how grammar would resemble that of Ancient Greek.

In the meantime, at around 12, she had already figured out what she wanted to do for life and where the closest University Department for Translators and Interpreters was located. Indeed, she took her diplomas of Translation and, later on, of Interpreting from the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece, in cooperation with the University of Surrey, in the UK. Upon starting her studies, she couldn’t but add more languages, so she took classes of Turkish, as well as Dutch – leading her to continuing her studies in the Netherlands, where she took her Master’s Degree on Slavic Languages and Cultures from the University of Leiden in cooperation with the University of Amsterdam.

Since then, she has become sworn translator and interpreter in the Netherlands, member of the national body for legal aid, and, when needed, she is acting as official translator and interpreter for the Embassy of Greece and the Embassy of Cyprus in The Hague, while she also cooperates with other embassies, NGOs and international institutions located there. Through her language and communication company LICSP, and in cooperation with the family Law Office in Athens, she provides services to private individuals and businesses, as well as public or government bodies, oftentimes as related to the EU meetings and councils.

On the side, she turned to a couple more languages, including Afrikaans and Indonesian, with no plan to stop there, for as long as life allows learning. It goes without saying that a book on Translation and, in particular, by her most admired Umberto Eco, is perfect to make her happy and even more motivated. Obviously, and not less importantly, the same applies for the always insightful blog of Patricia Brenes, who was not only generous to share the book with Danae, but keeps offering valuable assistance to the languages community on a daily basis!

(Thanks, Danae, for your support and kind words. Patricia)

The post Danae Parmaki, winner of the translation book raffle appeared first on In My Own Terms.

Just a short note to let you know that bab.la’s and Lexiophiles international blog competition is over and I managed to keep my 5th place in the Professional Language Blog category and also placed 25th in the overall classification.

Thank you so much for voting and sharing. I wouldn’t have been able to make it without you.

Also, huge congratulations to Licia Corbolante (@terminologia), who placed 2th in the same category and 7th in the overall classification, plus 14th in the Twitter category. A special thanks to her who asked her blog subscribers to vote for me. Thank you, Licia, and congratulations! 

My other long-time supporter, TermCoord placed 6th and Olga Geno (@OlgaJeno), who participated for the first time, placed 8th both in PLB category and Facebook category. Great job, Olga! And the awesome Maria Pia Montoro (@wordlo) placed 17th on Twitter too. Another great supporter, Nuria de Andrés (@nundrea) placed 8th in Language Twitters.

http://en.bab.la/news/top-25-language-professionals-blogs-2016

Thank you. Gracias, Grazie, Merci, Obrigada, Danke.

Patricia

The post 5th place again! Thanks for voting appeared first on In My Own Terms.

Hello readers,

I just found out that the WordPress widget for About.me profiles will be disabled starting July 1, 2016. I used to have a widget linked to my About.me page on the sidebar, so I have deleted the widget and created an “About” page in my main menu by adding more info to the profile taken from About.me, so that visitors know who I am and how this blog came to life.

Feel free to visit and learn a little bit about me. Click here.

Thanks again for subscribing to this blog and a special warm welcome to the new subscribers. This blog wouldn’t exist without your support.

The About.me page is still working and you may visit by clicking here.

Have a nice day!

Patricia

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When we deal with concepts, we also deal with terms in different forms. If we think of dictionaries, they put all concepts in one entry, while in a termbase we register each concept on separate term entries, a key difference between lexicography and terminology.

The terminologist carries out a ranking exercise, so to speak, in which s/he has to classify synonyms as “preferred”, “admitted”, or “deprecated” terms, making sure that they are all kept in a single entry to avoid doublettes. For example, which term should you use: shortcut key, hotkey, keyboard shortcut, access key, accelerator key, keyboard accelerator?

And if a termbase is well maintained, s/he might have to replace some of them with updated forms and register the previous form as “obsolete”. For example, at one point “periodontosis” was dropped in dentistry in favor of “periodontal disease”.

We may also have to deal with quasi-synonyms—terms with approximate meaning (disease/disorder, earthquake/earth tremor, speech-impared/stammerer). Therefore, careful analysis should be made to avoid confusion. In the words of Ariane Großjean, “terminology management must always aim at the unambiguous and clear use of terms or order to allow for a smooth communication. Thus, synonymy should be avoided in terminologies”.

A polysemic term has more than one meaning, i.e. different concepts are expressed by one term with different meanings but with the same etymological root. It is a very common occurrence in reterminologization (when a term adopts a new meaning, e.g., mouse-rodent and mouse-device) and it may lead to ambiguity if not clearly differentiated. Again, making sure that the term is registered separately when it has different meanings is key to avoid doublettes.

Identifying polysemy may be challenging if you don’t have sufficient technical knowledge or if you do not have access to the context. In the legal field, for example, “disposition” could have four different meanings (1) transferring something to another´s possession, (2) a final settlement of a case by court, (3) a provision in a statute, or (4) personal temperament of traits of character. Radek Vogel says that ambiguity may also arise when dealing with different coinages in British and American financial terminologies; for example, “own shares”, “debtors”, and “provisions” are the British equivalents for the American terms “Treasury stock”, “accounts receivable”, and “allowances”.

The message here is analyze and classify your terms following terminology principles to ensure consistency and avoid ambiguity. For a more extensive review of these and other forms of semantic relations of lexical units, I recommend taking a look at the sources below.

Sources and further reading:

Sevilla Muñoz Manuel. Semantic aspects of terms

Schmitz, Klaus-Dirk. Terms in texts and the challenge for terminology management.

Chromá, Marta. Synonymy and polysemy in legal terminology and their applications to bilingual and bijural translation

Großjean, Ariane, Corporate Terminology Management

Vogel, Radek. Synonymy and polysemy in accounting terminology: fighting to avoid inaccuracy.

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While I was writing this blog post, my friend and subscriber, Simona Tigris (and PhD in Philology), reminded me about homophones in a comment on my post on synonymy and polysemy. I couldn’t agree more with her. I had thought about writing a separate blog post, but when we talk about doublettes, one of the main causes seems to be the mishandling of homophones. So, after reading this blog post, I also recommend you take some time to read the links below.

Doublettes (the technical terms for duplicate entries) are quite common unless you have an elephant’s memory. During a recent webinar, terminologist Barbara Inge Karsh mentioned that between 5%-10% of entries need adjusting during maintenance. In order to keep that percentage at a minimum, we should try to do an efficient job in the early stages of term entry creation by following terminological principles.

During terminology work we try to achieve univocity (one term, one concept) However, sometimes it’s not as easy as we think it is. Even if we follow terminology rules (no plurals, checking terms in upper/lower case, verbs in simple form, etc.), we won’t be able to remember each and every record what we have created.

So what do we do? Best to hear the advice from the expert. Barbara provides a few recommendations in one of her blog posts:

1. “Start out by specifying the subject field in your database. It will help you narrow down the concept for which you are about to create an entry. You might do a search on the subject field and see what concepts you defined at an earlier time. Sometimes that helps trigger your memory.
2. As you are narrowing down the subject field and take a quick glance through some of the existing definitions, you might identify and recognize an existing concept as the one you are about to work on.
3. Export your database into a spreadsheet program and do a quick QA on your entries. In a spreadsheet, such as Excel, you can sort each column. If there are true doublettes, you might have started the definition with the same superordinate, which, if you sort the entries, get lined up next to each other.
4. Maybe you don’t have time for QA, then I would simply wait until you notice while you are using your database and take care of it then. The damage in databases with lots of languages attached to a source language entry is bigger, but there are usually also more people working in the system, so errors are identified quickly. For the freelance translator, a doublette here and there is not as costly and it is also eliminated quickly once identified.”

In one of the comments in her blog post there is also an additional suggestion: When dealing with a large amount of entries, discuss possible nuances in definitions and terms with subject-matter experts.

I recommend reading her posts related to this topic:

1. Doublettes, such a pretty term, yet such a bad word, which provides more information, particular on dealing with homonyms and homographs.
2. How do I identify a term—confusability. How to deal with homographs
3. Avoiding doublettes or a report from the ISO meetings in Korea
4. Why doublettes are bad

Also, Rafael Guzman’s T-Manager (read my blog post about it here) is a tool that allows you to analyze Excel files before importing to a termbase and flags and deletes duplicates in a glossary. But if you are entering your terms directly to your termbase, better follow Barbara’s advice.

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True. It might not be too often when we have to create a term “from scratch”. Terminologists rarely create terms and, when they do, it’s usually with the help and concerted effort of an expert. However, if you are a translator, you will probably have had the need to come up with new terms in your target language to convey the message of the source language.

So, the first case (creating a term from scratch in a source language) is called primary term formation, and the second case (creating a term by translating it into a second target language) is called secondary term formation.

But before we get into that, let’s take a quick look at how terms are formed. Maybe the easiest way to define them is by enumerating some of their characteristics:

1. Terms are created by a special language community, for example, experts from the chemistry field. Usually as a perceived need of the creator (known as the “motivation” of term formation).
2. Terms are created to transfer knowledge and improve communication among community experts, that is, an engineer communicating with his/her peers to promote the use of a standardized language.
3. Terms are usually created by combining existing lexical elements in particular ways, for example, the term “supercharge” is the combination of the words “super” and “charge”.
4. It is less spontaneous than word creation. Term creation usually occurs in a “more of less conscious creation” process (Sager).
5. Many terms are created by combining an object and a function. For example “greenhouse”
6. Even though term creation is currently dominated by the English language, particularly in the IT field, other languages have proved to have great creative potential.

Ariane Großjean mentions the following term formation methods: (i) terminologization, a common word is repurposed into a new term (e.g., bridge—construction and bridge—dentistry). (ii) derivation, a prefix or suffix is added to an existing root (e.g., de-caffein(e)-ate); (iii) compounding, two terms are combined to form a new term: noun-noun, adjective-noun, verb-noun, etc. (e.g. triple heart bypass –adjective+noun+noun) (iv) shortening, is done by clipping terms (e.g., influenza—flu), abbreviating (radar—radio detection and ranging), or blending (e.g., cybernetic organism—cyborg); (v) borrowing, words loaned from other languages (e.g. kindergarten, from German).

My next post will refer back to primary and secondary formation. Stay tuned and check out the Sources to get deeper into the term formation groove.

Sources and further reading:

Bowker Lynne, Variant terminology: frivolity or necessity?

Brenes, Patricia. De-Re-Terminologization. A blog post by IMOT.

Großjean, Ariane, Corporate Terminology Management. An approach in theory and practice.

Inge Karsch, Barbara. BIK Terminology. Blog posts on term formation

Sager, Juan C., A Practical Course in Terminology Processing.

Sasu, Laura. Terminology dynamics – conceptual patterns of term formation. 2009

Temmerman, Rita. Primary and secondary term creation and the process of understanding. A PowerPoint presentation. September 2013

Wright, Sue Ellen and Budin, Gerhard. Term Formation. Concept Representation. Handbook of Terminology Management. Volume 1.

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My previous post introduced briefly the topic of first and secondary term formation, a concept developed by Juan C. Sager. So, let’s go a little bit into detail.

According to Sager (1997)[4] the first process where the new concept is named by its creator in his/her native language is primary term formation and when the name given to a concept by its original creator passes from its original language into other languages it is secondary term formation. Below are the differentiating characteristics.

Primary term formation:

• Occurs when a newly created concept has to be named. It needs a definition to link the new term to existing ones in a given knowledge structure
• Is a spontaneous, uncontrolled activity but it is influenced by term creation patterns already existing in the relevant discipline (chemistry, engineering, etc.)
• Is usually monolingual, although according to Márta Fisher, multilingual terms can be created in parallel (see Multilingual term formation below)
• There is no linguistic precedent, that is, is not based on a previous term

Secondary term formation:

• Starts from an already existing term in a specific domain (molecular biology) and a particular setting (e.g. a research group formed to analyze spliceosomal factors in molecular biology)
• May be either mono-or multilingual
• The transfer of an existing term into another “linguistic community” is done via translation (term transfer)
• “In the modern world, where English dominates scientific and technical research, it means the way English-language terms are transposed into other languages” Juan C. Sager
• Is more frequently subject to rules than primary term formation and can be planned
• Term transfer may happen within one conceptual system (intra-conceptual term transfer—i.e. translation) or into another conceptual system (inter-conceptual term transfer—translation of national terms within national conceptual systems)
• There is always a precedent of an existing term in another language
• Usually more subject to guidelines than primary term formation
• Methods of secondary term formation include borrowing, loan translation, paraphrase, parallel translation, adaptation and complete new creation.
• Not always involves translation. Existing terms in the source language may be “rebaptised” when new entities are discovered in the same subject field. For example, “telephone” became “fixed telephone” when mobile telephones came to life.

Multilingual term formation:

Multilingual primary term-creation generally makes up a two-step process in practice: (1) primary term-creation in some languages followed by (2) secondary term creation (translation) into the other languages, for example, the designation of new EU concepts in 23 languages. German, French and German create terms simultaneously in the EU context, but for most languages terms are created via translation. e.g. In Eurospeak and “flexicurity” and “transposition “ are multilingual primary terms.

I hope that my two posts on this top allowed you to get more into the groove of term formation. And if you are left wanting more, below are excellent sources of information.

Sources and further reading:

Baker, Mona. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies

Fisher, Márta. Translation and terminology. Terminology in Everyday Life.

Großjean, Ariane, Corporate Terminology Management. An approach in theory and practice.

Sager, Juan C., A Practical Course in Terminology Processing.

Temmerman, Rita. Primary and secondary term creation and the process of understanding. A PowerPoint presentation. September 2013

Valeontis, Kostas  and Mantzari, Elena. The Linguistic Dimension of Terminology: Principles and Methods of Term Formation

Wright, Sue Ellen and Budin, Gerhard. Term Formation. Concept Representation. Handbook of Terminology Management. Volume 1.

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