26-27 March 2004

Organized by Pius ten Hacken (Swansea)
and Willy Martin (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

The topic of terminology has been approached traditionally from the perspective of standardization. More recently, corpus-based approaches have gained prominence. A question which is relevant to both approaches concerns the relationship of terminology to a theory of the lexicon.

In this conference, these perspectives were considered not only theoretically, but also from a practical angle. The study and management of terminology is an essential component of commercial, technical, and scientific translation. Computational tools provide an almost indispensible help to any translator, whether working in an institutional translation service, an independent translation company, or as a free-lance translator.

The linguistic situation in Wales constitutes a background in which terminological and translation problems gain a particular importance because of the strong popular and institutional footing of a minority language in a country with a world language as its national language. Approximately 20% of the 2.5 million inhabitants of Wales speak Welsh. The Welsh Assembly, created in 1999, has made Welsh an official language for legal purposes, which means that all laws in Wales are issued in two languages. Given this situation, terminology in Wales is relevant in a sense familiar from minority languages world-wide.

The conference featured a book exhibit by John Benjamins, with their latest publications in terminology on display, and software demonstrations by Atril (DéjàVu), Trados, and Star. It was financially supported by a Conference Grant of the British Academy.

Conference proceedings have been published as: ten Hacken, Pius (ed.) (2006), Terminology, Computing and Translation, Tübingen: Narr. ISBN 3-8233-6137-6. The volume includes not only the papers presented by the speakers, but also descriptions of some of the posters. The proceedings are available for purchase using the order form , or from the publisher's webpage (in German).

The presentations as shown on overhead or data projector can also be downloaded as pdf-files from the links on the Proceedings page.