Europos Komisijos projektas „EUROTERMBANK“

EUROPEAN COMMISSION PROJECT EUROTERMBANK (Collection of European terminology resources through cooperation among terminology institutions) Since early 2005, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language has participated as a partner in the European Commission project EuroTermBank (Collection of European terminology resources through cooperation among terminology institutions). The project includes partners from seven European Union countries—five of the new member states: Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, and two long-standing members: Denmark and Germany. The project coordinator is Tilde (Latvia), a Baltic information technology company specializing in language technologies, localization, and internet projects. Project partners: • Institute of Information Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne (Germany) – a research institute whose main objective is to develop, carry out, and coordinate scientific research and development projects in information management. • Centre for Language Technology at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) – a research institute in Denmark that conducts and promotes research and commercial development in language technology and computational linguistics. • Terminology Commission of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. The Commission coordinates and fosters the development and harmonization of Latvian terminology at the national level, taking into account the requirements of international terminology harmonization. The Terminology Commission and its 25 subcommittees conduct expert reviews of terms and their definitions and approve the proposed terms. • MorphoLogic (Hungary) – one of Hungary’s leading companies engaged in linguistic information processing. The company offers a wide range of language analysis tools and has more than ten years of experience in applied linguistics and corpus development. • Department of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, University of Tartu (Estonia). Several areas of research are pursued at this department of the University of Tartu: terminology, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, lexicography and lexicology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, phonology, and others. • Information Processing Centre (Poland) – an independent government research organization that collects and provides scientific and technological 169 information in Poland. The main objective of this centre is to facilitate rapid access to up-to-date scientific information in Poland. • Institute of the Lithuanian Language. The project aims to coordinate and unify terminology work in the new Member States of the European Union by drawing on the experience of terminology networks in other European Union countries. The project is directly aimed at Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, but is also open to other European Union countries, as well as interested parties and organisations outside the European Union. It provides an opportunity to exchange terminology data with national and European Union terminology databases, establish cooperation, apply uniform methodologies and standards, and create and implement data-exchange mechanisms and procedures. The aim is to assess the level of terminology work and best practices in the Baltic region and the European Union, and to provide recommendations for harmonising terminology based on the practices of those countries and the experience of experts. The main objectives of the EuroTermBank project are: 1. To develop and prepare a methodology for harmonising the terminology-development process in the new EU Member States and ensuring that its sources are suitable for use. 2. To establish a network of institutions involved in terminology work (source creators and database owners) at national and international levels, in order to facilitate the distribution, harmonisation and dissemination of terminology. 3. To create and develop an online terminology bank with easy and straightforward access to terminology sources. 4. To consolidate the content of various sources and terminology owners in order to create national terminology databases, and then integrate them into the EuroTermBank database or create appropriate interfaces. 5. To ensure the testing of the project results. An online terminology bank for the partner countries will be created, operating on a dual principle: as a central database and as an interface or gateway to other national or international terminology banks and resources. During the project, printed terminology dictionaries will be digitised; approximately 100,000 terms are planned to be digitised. Links have already been established and cooperation is under way with some international organisations and terminology banks, while links with others are expected to be established. A few organisations, terminology banks and projects may be mentioned: 170 • INFOTERM – the International Information Centre for Terminology, an international non-profit association founded in 1971 under an agreement between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Austrian Standards Institute (ON). Its objectives include serving as a cooperation framework for international, regional and national terminology organizations and institutions engaged in terminology work; collecting information about terminology activities and their results; advising various organizations on the multilingual aspects of specialized information and documentation, the application of harmonized principles and methods, as well as exemplary terminology work and the organization of other terminology activities; and supporting and promoting cooperation in the field of terminology in order to accelerate the development of terminology infrastructure for various languages and subject fields. EuroTermBank includes INFOTERM Council President Prof. Klaus Dirk Schmitz, who is Director of the Institute for Information Management. In addition, INFOTERM Director General Dr. Christian Galinski is involved in the project as an expert (LKI is an INFOTERM member). • NORDTERM – a network of Norwegian terminology centres with the Nordterm-Termbank terminology bank. • FINNISH TERMINOLOGY CENTRE – an independent non-profit association whose main activities include terminology projects, terminology services and the TEPA terminology bank. TEPA is a multilingual database of technical terminology containing approximately 100,000 terminology records. • EURODICAUTOM – the European Commission’s multilingual terminology bank. • TERMIUM – the Canadian terminology bank, one of the largest terminology banks in the world. • IATE – a project launched in 1999, Interactive Terminology for Europe, whose main objective was to create the terminology management infrastructure required by the European Union Translation Centre and decentralized EU agencies. A shared database was created containing EU legal terminology (including approximately 30,000 Lithuanian terms). In developing EuroTermBank, various tasks are assigned to project partners and experts: identifying user needs, cataloguing terminology resources, selecting content, setting content priorities, and so on. The project experts will set content priorities and make the selections. The following selection criteria for priorities are worth noting: 171 the suitability of terms for implementing EU legislation; the needs of local and international institutions; users’ needs; database quality, etc. The final criteria will be established after the methodology has been submitted. EuroTermBank is supported by the European Commission’s Electronic Content Programme (eContent Programme) (European digital content on the global network). This programme has been in operation since 2001. Three main areas of activity can be distinguished: a) promoting the use of public information and improving access to it, b) increasing content production in a multilingual and multicultural environment, and c) increasing the dynamism of the electronic content market. The main objectives of the project related to the Electronic Content Programme are: 1. To bring together linguistic resources, with particular emphasis on multilingual terminology. 2. To provide content providers and language service providers with a marketplace and convenient access to digitised terminology. An important aspect of the project is its focus on the languages of five new European Union Member States—Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish. Including the languages of the new Member States in Electronic Content Programme projects is one of the programme’s main objectives. Experts from various fields representing Western European countries and the new EU Member States are also involved in the project. An important part of the work concerns the transfer of knowledge and experience. Since EuroTermBank is a pilot project, the information-transfer process will also be directed towards other Eastern European countries, promoting and disseminating the project’s results. During 2005, the first year of the EuroTermBank project, a considerable amount of work had already been completed. Two boards were established: the Advisory Methodology Board and the Cooperation Board. The Advisory Methodology Board is the project’s organisational body responsible for matters related to the submission and development of the methodology; it discusses the content of terminology resources and evaluates the results of the work completed. At least one qualified expert from each partner country is included on the Advisory Methodology Board, whose chair was elected to be Lina Henriksen of the Centre for Language Technology at the University of Copenhagen. The Cooperation Board was established to foster broader cooperation among partner organisations in the countries involved that work in terminology, so that 172 As working practices are disseminated and the recommended methodology is shared, more detailed information is obtained about terminology resources, databases, their structure, data exchange possibilities, and other matters. Eight representatives from five countries have been invited to the Cooperation Council: from Poland—Aniela Topulos, Director of the Translation Department at the Office of the Committee for European Integration; Danuta Kierzkowska, President of the Association of Translators of Polish Economics, Law and Legal Affairs; and Tomasz Borkowski, a terminologist at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw; from Latvia—Eduards Cauna, an employee of the Terminology Commission, and Prof. Juris Borzovs, Chair of the Terminology Commission’s Subcommission on Information Technology; from Austria—Dr. Christian Galinski, Director General of INFOTERM; from Estonia—Arvi Tavastas, President of the Terminology Society; and from Lithuania—Nijolė Dudlauskienė, Head of the Standardization Division of the Lithuanian Standards Board. Over the course of this year, terminology resources in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania and Hungary have been described and analyzed; a user survey has been conducted and users’ needs assessed; a description of the database structure has been prepared; and the bank system software and the methodology recommended by the project are being developed. Copyright issues in all the countries have been analyzed, and agreements have been drawn up to be concluded with the holders of terminology resources. Analysis and compatibility assessment of the sources already received are under way, and the EuroTermBank project website has been prepared (address: www.eurotermbank.com), presenting the project and its key documents. Albina AUKSORIŪTĖ Received 2005-12-09 Institute of the Lithuanian Language 5 P. Vileišio Street, LT-10308 Vilnius Email: [email protected] 173