WordLo at LocWorld in Dublin

I enjoyed so much the TAUS-TaaS Workshop: the presentations were so interesting as well as the debate animated by the brilliant questions by Tex Texin. I met the Tilde team: Indra Samite and Andrejs Vasiļjevs, Uwe Muegge, Luigi Muzii, Jaap Van Der Meer and the lovely Anne-Maj.

I'm just grieving over one thing: I didn’t meet Catherine Christaki! We were both there and we both didn’t know! Arrrgh! :)

At Localization World Dublin 2014, I spoke on “Latest trends in terminology”.
The presentation was entitled: “If Content is King, Terminology is Queen” and took place on the 4 th of June at The Convention Centre, Dublin.

Speakers at the conference included representatives from Adobe Systems, eBay, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and other notable companies. The conference is held by MultiLingual
Computing, Inc. and The Localization Institute.
Attendees could choose from nine tracks during the main conference: Global Business,
Web/Mobile, Content Strategy, Translation Automation (TAUS), Localization Core
Competencies, Advanced Localization Management, Localization Service Provider
(LSP), Unconference and The Inside Track.

The preconference day, on the 4th of June, included round tables for consultants and
topics that include sales and marketing, life science business and game localization.
There was also a professional development initiative, an introduction to localization, a
quality evaluation summit and a track on interoperability standards.

I gave my presentation at TAUS-TaaS Workshop :Terminology in Localization.

TAUS-TaaS workshop was a free half-day meeting aimed to bring together terminology
practitioners, business stakeholders and researches to discuss the latest advances and
challenges in the terminology field.
TaaS workshop was a highly interactive event were researchers, software and service
companies, as well as users actively shared their experiences with the practical
application of terminology in the technical documentation life cycle and other areas of
the content value chain, including translation and localization workflows. Crisp use cases
from companies and practitioners on terminology in localization and current trends were
provided.
There was an official presentation of the new terminology platform:
Terminology as a Service.

In my presentation, I tackled the terminology trends and shared some examples
from my professional experience.
The main points of the presentations were:

1. Communicating about terminology by using social networks;
2. Social networks as available data for carrying out terminology research, in particular for monitoring language changes such as neologisms.
3. Websites are made of content and terminology is the critical part of the user experience.
4. Managing and sharing terminological data: cloud based, collaborative and social platforms.
5. The subject field of terminology is overwhelming, so some websites provide
6. terminological resources in few clicks.

In details:

• Communicating about terminology by using social networks:
• Social media is an appropriate consultation and response mechanism for terminological queries. 
• Social media offers easy access to expert opinions by researching and asking questions to followers, and establishing their expertise by answering questions.
• Who is following terminology related conferences can live-tweet updates.
• Companies such as translation agencies usually do not merely promote their business and services, but provide helpful tips and links.
• Social networks are a source in terminological research. By providing latest news in terminology, or issues facing translators/terminologists and how they are dealing with them.
• In a collaborative effort, everyone contributes what they have, what they know, what they have read or seen, to the mix.

Social networks as available data for carrying out terminology research, in particular for monitoring language changes such as neologisms.
The explosion of social media has accelerated the creation of new words as different
cultures and languages interact. The curiosity for neologisms is becoming stronger and
stronger. Twitter is the most suitable social media to track language changes. Its data is
public and immediately available. More and more researchers are beginning to work on
projects consisting in analysing tweets to catch the next most popular word. 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. The users of online social media produce a tremendous amount of text
each day, much of which is readily available for lexicographical analysis. Easy access to
such very large corpora is quite new, and has opened new possibilities for
lexicographical inquiry. In particular, corpus patterns that are very rare in conventional-
size corpora turn to have many occurrences in the very large corpora of social media.
Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in
fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language
data to analyze.

If content is King, Terminology is Queen

Websites are made of content. User interacts with content. When users encounter
problems with content, then those problems often culminate in terminological issues.
Content is part of the user experience mix and terminology is the critical part of the user
experience.
Terminology can be seen as a resource that can improve the performance and
effectiveness of a broad range of language-related applications of websites, beyond
translation, including:

• Web lookup;
• Publication of website glossaries (where users can find the meaning of corporate terminology at a glance. Those glossaries not only cover an explicative function, but also improve the SEO of the websites, in being descriptive keywords for search engines to index);
• Improvement of productivity, searchability, findibility of content (keywords, query expansion, query correction, faceted search);
• Text analysis, text mining;
• Term extraction and other forms of knowledge discovery;
• Online Terminology Extraction tools can be successfully used to raise a website visibility and SEO by using extracted terms as keywords, tags and meta-tags and indexing;
• Developing user-friendly navigation.

Managing and sharing terminology: cloud based, collaborative and social
platforms

Sharing terminology can only bring benefits. It helps improving consistency, uniformity
and reliability of data. The sharing of existing terminological data helps lexicographers,
translators, and terminologists to use right terms even without being experts and
prevents them from spending too much time looking for resources, extracting terms and
checking their reliability.

One-stop shop websites for terminology resources

The subject field of terminology is overwhelming, there is so much information scattered
here and there on the Internet that is easy to get lost with so much information. In order
not to spend hours surfing the internet, universities or simply passionates, are taking the
initiative to develop websites and blogs applying, in the words of Google, the “I’m feeling
lucky” approach: to find the information that you are looking for just by a few clicks.

WordLo at LocWorld: Among Terminology VIPs

I’m so thrilled I will be speaking at TAUS-TaaS Workshop at Localization World on the 4th of Jun in Dublin! I will be among the VIPs of terminology, all those I follow on social media and reading every single post end essay they write!

Well, what will I talk about? Simply about terminology from my point of view: as a blogger, as a passionate, as someone who simply enjoys this subject. 

“Calling it a hobby isn’t sufficient, but calling it professional makes it seem like it is work”.

I will show the terminology trends and share some examples from my experience as a blogger:

1. Communicating about terminology by using social networks;
2. Social networks as available data for carrying out terminology research, in particular for monitoring language changes such as neologisms;
3. Websites are made of content and terminology is the critical part of the user experience ( I already wrote about this topic here);
4. Managing and sharing terminological data: cloud based, collaborative and social platforms;
5. The subject field of terminology is overwhelming, so some websites provide terminological resources in few clicks.

I will (try) to keep you updated from Dublin on Twitter: @WordLo

Quote from:  Erin McKean: The Dictionary Editor Who Wants You to Invent More Words | Rising Stars | OZY 

Yay! I've been nominated!

I am so excited to announce that my Twitter account “@WordLo” and this blog have been nominated for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2014 competition hosted by bab.la language portal and Lexiophiles language blog!

I’m honored to be among so many talented language lovers.

  

Thank you to those who supported my nomination and to those who will vote for me!

Voting has just started, from 20^th  of May to the 9^th  of June. The winners will be announced on the 12^th of June. 

Please, click on the following banners to vote!

No more up all night to get lucky

The subject field of terminology is so overwhelming that it is easy to get infoxicated (lost with so much information).

To prevent spending nights on searching on the internet, more and more institutions, researches, companies  and simply passionate people, are taking the initiative to develop websites and blogs applying, in the words of Google, the “I’m feeling lucky” approach: to find the information that you are looking for in one-stop shop website. (Hi Patricia! I stole this expression from your blog, I really love it!).

So, look no further and enjoy using those resources that best embody, in my opinion, the “feeling lucky” approach.

Terminology Forum: Terminology Forum is a global non-profit information forum for freely available terminological information online. The Forum, maintained by Anita Nuopponen with the help of her students at the Dept. of Communication Studies, University of Vaasa, Finland, provides information on terminological activities including terminology work, research and education, online glossaries and termbanks from different fields as well as on general language dictionaries in various languages. 

Strong point: Just check Terminological Organisations, TerminologicalEducation and Bibliography, nowhere you can find such an amount of information. Really very well done.   

In My Own Terms: This newborn blog deserves all our attention even only for the enthusiasm of its creator: Patricia Brenes.  The blog provides sources to basic information on terminology, glossaries, resources which have useful sources or bibliography at the end. 

Strong point: Frequently updated, fresh material added every day (and she quotes me among the resources ^_^).

Termcoord.eu: How not to mention Termcoord? The staff of the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament, with the help of the trainees, never stops surprising you by providing resources from the EU and not only, a weekly selection of terms from the EU terminology database IATE related to current events, news from most important conferences on terminology and a lot of useful tools such as the frequently-updated list of selected glossaries, Glossary Links. 

Strong Point: It is the Mecca of terminology, what else?

Taus Directory: TAUS just released this new directory of translation technologies as a free and open service to the global translation industry. The directory contains listings of translation support tools, machine translation engines and language technology tools. It is not strictly related to terminology but of course terminology is directly involved as a lot of resources are listed. 

Strong Point: I was just impressed by the fresh and minimal look and I have to say that this is how a real “feel lucky” layout should be: white background, fresh vivid colours, flat design, html5 (looks like) and just a search box and four buttons to refine your search.

Update 09/05/2014 - Lingua Greca Toolbox: I definitely had to add this impressive list of resources by Catherine Christaki. Everybody in the online language community knows her and loves her because she always tries to help by sharing useful resources, recommend potential clients and so on.
Strong Point: It is very hard to put such an amount of resources in one page and Catherine successfully managed to do that. Here you don't have the sensation of being lost.
Take also a look to the section weekly favorites to be updated on latest news, interesting blog posts and online articles on translation, interpreting, language, as well as freelancing, blogging, business and social media. If you missed any of the great content, here is your chance to catch up.

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.

T

Word For That: the tip-of-the-tongue-eliminator

Words For That is a versatile site mirroring the versatile nature of language. It can be used in a number of different ways: A tip-of-the-tongue-eliminator, an informal reverse-dictionary, laugh at funny definitions or "scenarios".

Background
Words For That was created as platform for pointing out and having fun with well-known situations which have never earned a name of their own. These "scenarios" can be anything - a feeling, a circumstance, a type of person, a coincidence. Anything where you've thought, "there should be a word for that!" Visitors can vote on each Scenario based on how well it rings a bell, or makes them laugh, or whatever. The best Scenarios are those where everyone can say "I know exactly what you mean!"

Scenarios are submitted and voted on by the site visitors. For each of these Scenarios, "words" can be submitted. These Words can be anything as well - a single word, a phrase, a clever pun, or an etymological masterpiece. Whatever's submitted, however, is also up to the mercy of the voting masses. Only the best Words have a chance at being the new coined term!

Source: Word For That