doi.org/10.35321/term27-12

Scientific Seminar “Terminology: Issues in Science and Practice”

RAMUNĖ VASKELAITĖ

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

The autumn scientific seminar organized at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language (hereafter, the Institute), which invites Lithuanian terminologists (both researchers and representatives of terminology management), as well as terminology creators and users, to review events and work important to terminology and to examine current terminology issues, has become a tradition. It was therefore held again this October (October 16), though in a format unconventional for this event—using the remote seminar and conference platform Google Meet. It proved very convenient: more than sixty participants interested in terminology as a field of study, its development, and terminology management and creation took part in the seminar without any disruptions, listened to the speakers, and joined the discussion.

The most important event for terminology this year is undoubtedly the thirtieth anniversary of the restoration of the state’s independence. Viewing it through a terminologist’s lens, Alvydas Umbrasas, senior researcher at the Institute, first noted in his presentation “Terminology 30 Years Ago and Now” that the year Lithuania’s statehood was restored was also the year the independent Institute was revived (until 1990, it operated as a research institution jointly with the Institute of Lithuanian Literature). For the terminology developed at the Institute, the restoration of statehood also meant the establishment of a separate unit devoted exclusively to terminology (the Terminology Department was established in 1991) and the launch of an entirely new publication—the still-active journal Terminologijos. For terminologists, the start of this period brought a deluge of practical work, which descended upon the Lithuanian language after a fairly long period of bilingualism, when it became the state language and its domains of use expanded considerably. Thus, as became clear from the presentation, the creation of a separate unit and the launch of a journal opened up more opportunities to develop terminology as a science; initially, however, terminology as terminology management probably demanded more resources: terminology standards had to be prepared, expert assessments carried out, and work done on terminology dictionaries in preparation, while at the same time regretting,

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that the prospects for publishing them were poor—that no one wanted to publish the dictionaries that had been prepared, and that dictionaries not reviewed by terminologists were being published. There were also plans to create a terminology database (bank) covering virtually every domain of terminology use, and in 2003 the Lietuvių kalbos terminynas was completed. Summing up the work of the early years alone, the speaker stated that during the first few years after the restoration of independence, an environment for Lithuanian terminology research was created, impetus was given to the terminological evaluation of terminology dictionaries and standards, and the foundations were laid in Lithuania for the development of computerized terminology databases.

Over time, practical work was successfully shared with other institutions (the Lithuanian Standards Board, the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, and the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics) and, as noted in A. Umbrasas’s presentation, the proposal raised in 1991, when the Terminology Department was established, to distribute terminology work among four state institutions was almost fully implemented. However, this presentation sought to review the significance of the restoration of statehood only for the terminology developed at the Institute, focusing mainly on the beginning of that restoration. Over the thirty years since the restoration of the state, more institutions have emerged to develop terminology, including some higher education institutions, and the forms of its development have expanded considerably. For example, two poster presentations by other Institute representatives showed that participation in international projects—which allow Lithuanian terminology resources to be included in a broader, European context while also providing access to the terminology resources of other countries—has become an integral, indeed essential, part of terminology work today. The Institute’s director, Albina Auksoriūtė, presented a project to develop a European language network. Through this project, the Institute, as a national competence centre, is working with 31 other national competence centres to help create a cloud platform that provides access to commercial and non-commercial language technology services and datasets in all European languages. Asta Mitkevičienė, head of the Institute’s Terminology Centre, introduced a project to develop the Federated eTranslation TermBank network. Together with nine other institutions, the project aims to develop a central machine translation (eTranslation) network by creating local nodes for managing terminology and exchanging its resources.

However, the presentation “Bilingual auto-” delivered by Sigita Rackevičienė, professor at Mykolas Romeris University, particularly highlighted how the forms of terminology work have changed compared with the first years of the restored state.

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“Automatic term recognition (DVITAS): concept and initial work.” It presented a project undertaken by a group of representatives of two higher education institutions—the Mykolas Romeris University and Vytautas Magnus University (Sigita Rackevičienė, Liudmila Mockienė, Andrius Utka, Aivaras Rokas, Marius Laurinaitis, and Agnė Bielinskienė). Its eventual outcome is also intended to be a term base, but one created using state-of-the-art technologies: specially trained neural networks are to extract terms for the base from parallel and comparable corpora. The field of cybersecurity was selected for developing this term base (according to the speaker, because of its relevance, the unsettled nature of its terminology, and the need for such a base among translators and cybersecurity specialists). However, a base consisting specifically of terms from this field could serve as a model for creating term bases in other fields as well. Thus, the project aims to present a methodology for creating term bases based on modern technologies. The speaker identified the compilation and annotation of parallel and comparable corpora as the project’s current stage; the next tasks are to develop and train neural networks.

The seminar provided an opportunity to measure the technological leap in terminological work across an even longer period, taking 1906 as the point of reference, when the first dictionary of botanical terms was published. However, Albina Auksoriūtė, chief research fellow at the Terminology Centre and director of the Institute, examined not the preparation process or methodology of this dictionary, namely Povilo Matulionio Žolynas. Dalys II. Lietuvos augalų žodynas ir augalų taislas, but the plant and fungal genus names attributed in it to Laurynas Ivinskis. This year marks not only the centenary of the restoration of the state, but also the 210th anniversary of the birth of L. Ivinskis, one of the first creators of scientific terms in the natural sciences. In her paper “Laurynas Ivinskis’s Plant Genus Names in Povilo Matulionis’s Žolyne,” the speaker selected suffixal derivatives from among all the terms attributed to L. Ivinskis in the dictionary, drew attention to the clarity of their formation and motivation, and, seeking to establish their true authorship, compared them with the terms in the scientific work Prigimtūmenė, prepared by L. Ivinskis and preserved as a manuscript, thereby also revealing the difficulties of identifying the sources of old terms. Some of the terms attributed to L. Ivinskis do not appear in Prigimtūmenė; it was therefore concluded that, when attributing the terms to L. Ivinskis, P. Matulionis most likely had some other manuscript by L. Ivinskis at his disposal, one that has since been lost.

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Palmira Zemlevičiūtė, who also conducts research at the Institute’s Terminology Centre, did not mention difficulties in identifying sources for the terms of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that she had selected as her research material. Drawing on medical terms used in booklets and articles on medical and health issues during this historical period, however, in her paper “On Ambiguous Medical Terms of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” she raised another problem that remains relevant today: the polysemy of terms. The proposition that a term should have one meaning is regarded as a kind of terminological axiom, yet numerous empirical studies reveal that a considerable proportion of terms have not one but two, three, or even more meanings. This prompts closer examination both of the contradiction between the axiom and research findings and of the causes of term polysemy. It is of course impossible to investigate these matters fully in a single seminar paper, but this paper showed that there are relatively few ambiguous terms, at least among the older medical terms, even though 98 popular-science publications from the period were reviewed. The speaker cited mainly terms with two meanings as ambiguous, but mentioned few of them (veidas, pilvas, pilvelis, nosis, drugys, vabalėlis, etc.). Among the terms with four meanings, only gydykla was found in the terminology examined by the speaker, which represents the initial stage in the formation of medical terminology. Thus, the terminology of the period and field under study seems to support the axiom: as words of everyday language become terms, polysemy decreases.

Another problem of particular relevance to the theory and practice of terminology was examined in the paper “Term Synonymy and Terminology Management” by Asta Mitkevičienė, a researcher and head of the Terminology Centre. As is well known, avoiding synonymy is also one of the principles of terminology management often regarded as axiomatic: one concept should be designated by one term, that is, a term should not have synonyms. On the other hand, few empirical studies fail to mention synonymous terms used in one field or another. And although term synonymy is usually considered a feature only of the initial stage of terminological development, synonymous terms can also be found in fields whose terminology is considered advanced in terms of development. Having reviewed the prescriptive approach to synonyms, the reasons for avoiding them, and the principles of term standardization, the speaker—who has examined term synonymy in several previous articles—focused this time on synonyms with different motivations and showed that they serve functional purposes, so it is not possible to assert categorically

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that only one of these synonyms should be used. Thus, the seminar raised genuinely new ideas on synonymy, suggesting at the very least that it be viewed as a much more complex phenomenon than is usually assumed.

Besides synonymy and polysemy, the issue of term borrowing also remains continually relevant to the theory of terminology and especially to its practice. This issue was also taken up at the seminar by another representative of the Institute’s Terminology Centre. Aušra Rimkutė, a senior research fellow at the Centre who has recently been studying clothing and footwear terms (her article Naujieji avalynės pavadinimai can be found in the previous issue of Terminologijos), discussed several clothing and footwear terms borrowed from English in her paper “A Few Thoughts on Clothing Terms” (džegingsai, tregingsai, megingsai, kroksai, konversiukai), as well as terms coined using the resources of the native language (timpės, tamprés, aptemtukai, aptemptukės, tampdžinsiai, timpdžinsiai), using these examples to demonstrate the capabilities and resources Lithuanian has for creating terms. The researcher drew her examples from the Lietuvių kalbos naujažodžių duomenynas compiled by the Institute, which includes borrowings, neologisms, word combinations, words with new meanings, and abbreviations that have entered Lithuanian since the end of the twentieth century (http://naujazodziai.lki.lt). Asked which of the new terms—borrowings or Lithuanian coinages—were more likely to become established, the author said she had not conducted specific research (and such research would indeed be more appropriately undertaken by researchers of general language usage and norms), but drew attention to the domain of use: non-Lithuanian names are more common in the language used by young people...

The paper by Dalia Gedzevičienė, a researcher at the Law Institute of Lithuania, also focused on specific terms—intelekto sutrikimas, protinis atsilikimas, proto negalia, silpnaprotystė—in her presentation “Terminology for Designating Intellectual Disabilities and Its Influence on Social Attitudes.” It provided a detailed account of both the circumstances in which these terms arose and their meanings and the relationships between those meanings, as well as the difficulties that arise in usage from employing these terms. Above all, however, the paper sought to draw attention to terms as a factor shaping social attitudes. According to the speaker, because people with intellectual disabilities have been socially excluded for decades, their isolation has become entrenched in society’s consciousness as a customary way of treating people with disabilities. This is perhaps the main reason why it is currently difficult to reduce the exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities (especially when seeking to integrate children with disabilities into mainstream schools or to return people with disabilities to their communities,

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for example, by establishing small group homes for them in the centres of cities or towns). As became clear, the greatest obstacle to integration is not a lack of funding, but negative, even hostile, societal attitudes toward people with disabilities, and the stereotypical belief that a person with a disability is “dangerous” and must live apart from the community. Referring to terms as one of the factors shaping social attitudes toward a particular subject, and drawing on the power of terms to designate a new concept or different content, the speaker hypothesized that a change in terminology can also bring about or accelerate a shift in social attitudes, the public’s position, and even patterns of behaviour toward the person being named. The presentation also drew attention to the metaphorical aspect of terms, noting that although metaphors are considered one method of term formation, this method is not equally acceptable in all fields.

In summary, the scientific seminar shows that this year’s event, too, managed to cover both the most significant developments in terminology and the most topical themes, as well as a range of fields and their terms. The period covered by the terminology examined was also broad: from historical terminology, including that created by L. Ivinskis and by Lithuanian doctors at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, to the latest terms coined by contemporary creators—timpių, tamprių, aptemtukų, tampdžinsių, timpdžinsių—and the terminology databases, collections and clouds that will increasingly be created in the future using smart technologies. This once again confirms that term creation is an ongoing process, and that its success and direction require continuous terminology management, comprehensive terminology research, and the search for new methods.

Received 2020-10-22

Ramunė Vaskelaitė

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

5 P. Vileišio St., LT-10308 Vilnius

Email: [email protected]

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