Theme
Conference Topic
Terminology: discourse, technology and social partners
In the last few years, terminology has increased its links with other disciplines, both in the humanities and in experimental science. It has also diversified its practices from concept modelling and knowledge engineering, to issues of definition and consulting services.
No doubt one of the reasons for these developments has been the taking into account of social factors in the emergence, dissemination and establishment of concepts and terms. This has lead to contributions from, for example, sociolinguistics, ethnology, sociology, history, cultural anthropology and politology.
This integration of social factors has been reinforced by the impact of technological tools (electronic corpora, extraction, analysis, indexation, and terminology management software, concordancers, etc.). In addition, some professional activities, like information retrieval, have become even more terminology-greedy. It has thus been and continues to be necessary to feed translation memory software and automatic translation programs.
Henceforth, the multiplicity of requirements and the diversity of situations of use oblige us to examine contexts and social partners in terminology.
The term context includes
- the social and economic context (language policy and also, possible terminological planning in the whole of society (in a minority situation or not), in business, in the public services; the requirements and the costs of the terminology effort; the volume of work to be done; concern for the establishment of terms; terminometric effort, etc.- the many parameters that influence working conditions, strategies and choices)
- the social context (drawing attention to institutions, partners (and their tools) and behaviours - experts in the field, engineers, translators, journalists, technical writers, students, etc.). Who is involved in the different phases of this terminographic activity? What are the relationships between them? How are any differences resolved ? How do they each perceive their role? What decision procedures are in place?
- the linguistic and cultural context (focusing on values, representations, and ideologies). What language norms are privileged ? What are people’s attitudes to language change, neology and inter-language contact? How are multilinguism and the place of English perceived? To what extent are geographical and social variations in languages taken into account ?
- the cognitive and discourse context (shared knowledge, role of subjectivity in decisions, the textual span considered in terminological analysis, importance given to text types, etc.).
Evidently, the kinds of interaction in which concepts and terms are created and used have an influence on the way they are processed: an (oral) discussion and a (written) exchange between an expert in one domain and an expert in another, between experts and students, journalists and novice readers, terminologists and translators, language experts and decision makers (editors, government officials, bankers, etc.) diversify to the extreme their ever-contextualized exchanges. It is in these situated, ephemeral, contingent, linguistically marked discourses, that terminological meanings are negotiated, that momentary semantic consensus is established and that use evolves.
There is no terminology without discourses and partners interacting in a dialogue that is partly subject to the conventions of production and interpretation but that is also a place for creativity.
We await your proposals