Congress of the Asociación Española de Terminología (Spanish Terminology Association) 2016
Congress of the Asociación Española de Terminología (Spanish Terminology Association) 2016
TERMINOLOGY, DIGITAL TEXTS AND MACHINE TRANSLATION
As a discipline, terminology provides the foundations for the creation and the management of specialised vocabulary, the study and analysis of new terms and the dissemination of these terminologies, mainly in the form of dictionaries. Today, however, information flows continuously across a wide range of different types of texts, and experts or the users of these specialised texts are beginning to call for new ways of accessing terminological information that are compatible with the immediacy required by this new digital, virtual and global environment.
Dictionaries, as we knew them in the last century, will not disappear, but their contents must become increasingly more present in everyday life in applications that complement the texts by being embedded within the actual text itself rather than as separate elements. Thus, we now have software applications that facilitate the integration of the meaning of any word that appears within a digital text. Some devices have already been designed in such as way as to include this capability (e.g. ebook readers). As time goes by, any user will ask to be able to have access to linguistic information about any term while reading any digital text.
Terminology can and must take this evolution into account and, accordingly, prepare resources that facilitate this adaptation and make them available to any professional sector (medicine, engineering, law) and to any user (experts, semi-experts, general public). Moreover, it must provide the means of enabling access to a globalised world in which information can be offered in the different languages used around the world. In this regard, machine translation stands out as an essential resource in the different areas of specialisation, and terminology must contribute to its development by providing terminological resources in both “passive” forms, by offering, for example, the terminological equivalences, and “active” forms, so as to guide the algorithmic and heuristic processes used in machine translation systems.
Hence, our aim is to hold a Scientific Congress in order to inform on the different advances being accomplished in the dissemination of terminological resources through a range of different types of digital texts, as well as to present the ways in which terminological resources are or will be included in machine translation systems. By so doing, our intention is to promote the knowledge of these innovative approaches among terminologists and other professionals interested in language technologies, terminology and translation, while also fostering discussion and the exchange of information among the different experts involved in the processes of creating terminological resources for use by other experts or by natural language processing systems, such as machine translation systems or systems capable of generating digital texts.