Notes from EAFT Seminar on Minority Languages and Terminology Policies
The Seminar on Minority Languages and Terminology Policies was organized by the European Association for Terminology (EAFT) in Dublin on 27 and 28 July, 2007. The following notes attempt to highlight some of the issues that came up during the seminar.
What is terminology for?
The seminar was devoted to terminology, and before going anywhere further it may be useful to spend some time discussing what kind of discipline terminology is and what it is that terminologists actually do.
In many situations, terminology is a corporate activity. Many international companies today are constantly translating documents and localizing software for local markets worldwide, and they often take care to standardize the terminology that appears in their translations. If you are, say, Microsoft, and you are localizing software into Spanish, you probably want all your Spanish translators to translate terms such as click and word processor the same way. In other words, you need to standardize your IT terminology, and you hire terminologists to do that for you.
But terminology can also be a language-wide activity, not confined to the style guides of any individual company or to an individual subject field. In some countries, institutions exist whose mission is to standardize the terminology of all subject fields for all speakers of the language. An example is the Swedish Centre for Terminology, an institution which publishes dictionaries and makes recommendations to the Swedish-speaking public as to what they should call things.
Such activities are motivated by the opinion that they are a good thing for the language. Many people believe that standardized terminology is necessary to enable the language to continue to be used in specialized domains such as science and engineering. It is feared that if terminology in these fields isn’t standardized, then the language will just disintegrate into a mixture of awkward loan-words (mostly from English) and ad-hoc coinage that no-one other than the speaker understands.
The lack of standardized terminology and its effects on a language can be readily observed on many of Europe’s minority languages such as Irish, Catalan, Basque, Sorbian or Romani. Let’s take Irish for an example. Even though Irish is a living language, there is a lack of mutually-agreed ways to call certain things, especially in areas such as technology and politics. This makes it difficult for Irish speakers to discuss technology and politics in their language. The result is a high number of borrowings from English, a large amount of code-switching into English, and even the rejection of Irish altogether.
Institutions such as the Irish Terminology Committee or the Catalan Centre for Terminology exist to counter such developments. Their job is to do research, to find suitable terms in the language for expressing certain concepts (from technology, politics etc.), sometimes even to coin completely new terms, and finally to persuade the language community to use those terms. The Dublin seminar was basically a gathering of people who work for such institutions.
User acceptance
The working methods of terminology are well known. When looking to standardize a term for a particular concept, the language is usually searched for existing terms, new terms are coined if necessary, and the candidates are evaluated against a set of criteria such as transparency (is the term easy to understand for those who haven’t heard it before?), usability (is it easy or awkward to use the term in a sentence?), derivability (can related words such as adjectives and antonyms be derived easily?) and so on. But this is only half the job. Arguably the most important part of terminology standardization is the dissemination part, that is, making people out there know, accept and use the terms you came up with.
It became apparent during the seminar that this can be a problem for some terminology organizations. The Irish Language Commissioner highlighted the problem in his opening address, and it became one of the most discussed topics. It is felt that terminology regulators are sometimes not doing enough to publicize and promote the results of their work. Publishing dictionaries and, lately, on-line databases is good and important work, but the problem with dictionaries is that they often come with an implicit or implied prescriptivism. People do not like to be told what to call things, especially if nobody explains to them why a particular term was selected, what the other candidates were, and why they were rejected.
I can confirm from my own experience that the public image of the Irish Terminology Committee among Irish speakers is one of secrecy and elitism. People imagine the Committee as a council of elders who sit in a smoke-filled room and declare terms as official by the power of authority. While this image has been changing for the better lately (also thanks to the terminology website focal.ie which I was privileged to be involved in creating) more needs to be done to convince the public that the Terminology Committee is there to serve the people and not to impose on them.
The good news is that terminologists usually know this. It’s more of a question of money and resources, and lobbying sponsors. Terminology bodies tend to be understaffed and underfunded and find it difficult to devote time to long-term campaigns. For example, we were told at the seminar that the Irish Terminology Committee is preparing to publish a “terminology manual” which should promote a better public understanding of what the Committee does and how – but preparing this takes time which they need to steal away from their normal work.
Domain loss
The seminar was laid out in such as way that the first day was devoted entirely to the Irish case, and the second day to other languages. There were representatives from many languages and not all of them would conventionally be classed as minority ones. In today’s world, however, almost every language – except a chosen few – is a minority language if you broaden the context enough.
Almost all languages in Europe today, large and small, are affected by the phenomenon of domain loss. Domain loss occurs when a language is gradually displaced in a certain discipline by another language, for example when biochemistry in Slovenia gradually ceases to be “done” in Slovenian and English takes over.
This has been happening everywhere in Europe for the last few decades, and is likely to continue. In certain spheres of research, in the sciences, in third-level education and in business, the local language is slowly but surely giving way to English. Sometimes the process is voluntary at the individual level (for example a scientist decides to publish in English to reach a wider audience), sometimes it is imposed (such as when a university decided to teach some courses in English because “that is the way to go”), sometimes it is just fashionable. Some countries are affected by the trend more than others.
If the trend of domain loss continues, even stable national languages such as Slovenian or Swedish could one day lose so many domains that they will, in fact, be in the same position as Irish and Catalan are today: minority languages in their own countries.
It is not surprising that many terminologists are worried about this, and this came up strongly during the seminar. Terminologists often see it as their mission not only to facilitate but also to actively promote the use of their language in as many domains as possible. The phenomenon of domain loss is thus an enemy.
Presuming that domain loss is a bad thing (and not everybody agrees to that), how can it be stopped or at least kept within limits? Part of the answer is good old terminology work, making it as easy and as facile as possible for people to continue using their local language in the affected domains. Another part of the answer is probably a good amount of awareness building and public discussion on the matter. The “future” minority languages of Europe, the likes of Swedish and Slovenian, have a lot to learn from today’s minority languages in terms of argumentation and awareness building.
The problem of domain loss was not approached at the seminar as much as many participants would have liked, mainly because it is not just a terminology problem. An unexpected observation, though, was the fact that some languages actually seem to be experiencing domain gain instead of loss. Delyth Prys of Canolfan Bedwyr in Wales raised this in her presentation about Welsh, and I can confirm it from my own experience with Irish. Some domains seem to have been reclaimed by Welsh and Irish recently as a result of changes in society. Irish and Welsh are now alive and kicking in some areas of the media and education, having previously been absent from them for several generations. It seems that not all is lost and that languages can face the challenge of global English successfully.
It seems that the linguistic landscape in Europe is undergoing some slow but fundamental changes right now. It is becoming more common for Europeans to be bilingual or even multilingual, and attitudes to languages are changing too. While nobody doubts the leading role and the usefulness of English as a language for certain purposes, the other languages are not leaving the scene any time soon – they are merely being repositioned as languages of identity, languages their speakers can warm up to, while English and several other larger languages are beginning to appear more like auxiliaries for practical communication in certain domains.
So, is a new linguistic order emerging? Only time will tell if it is, and what implications it will bring for terminologists.