Twitter provides 'selfies' of evolving language

Twitter and other social media are an immense resource that can offer linguists the opportunity to explore how our words and phrases are changing.

More and more researchers are beginning to work on projects consisting in analysing tweets to catch the next most popular word.

Why Twitter? 

Because its data is public and immediately available. A huge data consisting of around 340 million tweets sent every day, according to Twitter.

Twitter offers records of language mutating in real time and space. Many tweets provide location data and the time they were sent allowing thus to map out the way in which new words become popular and spread.

Because tweets tend to be rather informal, there are a lot of types of creative usages of words. Tweets appear similar to spontaneous speech, making them particularly valuable to the study of the spread of new words and expressions.

Sources: 

• Linguistic researchers begin hunt for the next 'selfie'
• Using social media to find English lexical blends, By P. Cook (PDF)

Sharing is caring

Sharing terminology can only bring more benefits. It helps improving consistency, uniformity and reliability of data. 

The sharing of existing terminological data helps  translators, terminologists, researchers (but I would not exclude students, journalists, web writers  and whoever works with knowledge) to use the right terms even without being experts and preventing them from spending too much time looking for resources, extracting terms and checking their reliability.

Here a list of my favourite resources:

TAUS Data: a cloud platform based on shared translation memories. I use almost every day TAUS Data for technical translations and thank to it I can choose the right term by checking the context (always reliable) and being sure I have selected the right term even without being an expert on the particular subject.

Taas - Cloud Services for Terminology Work: New look for this cloud based portal providing multilingual and collaborative terminology services. Beta version for now, flat design, scroll-down layout, the look of a start-up website expressing the innovative attitude of this project funded by the European Commission and managed by Tatiana Gornostay. By logging-in it is possible to access to the tools such as a look-up tool, a term extractor providing term candidates from various sources, and the possibility to share your terminology with other users.

TermWiki.com: is a collaborative terminology portal that allows users to search, upload, translate and share terms and definitions with other users. I have to say that the staff behind this portal is really nice, friendly and always ready to help you to improve their tools to better suit your needs. My favourite tool is the TermWiki GlossaryWidget and I have one on this blog.

The added value of the websites I listed above is that they are making a good job at making terminology sharing easy and intuitive.In this guest post I wrote for Termwiki, I'm describing how much desirable it would be to have a kind of “Apple logic” applied to terminology management.

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