The headquarters of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC) in Barcelona hosted, on 16 and 17 November, the EAFT Terminology Summit 2023, which takes place biannually and was on this occasion jointly organised by the EAFT and Termcat with the support of the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government and the French Ministry of Culture, and with the collaboration of the IEC. Nearly a hundred terminology specialists from all over Europe met to share experiences and reflections on innovation and sustainability in terminology in a multilingual environment.
The aim of this edition of the Summit, entitled Terminology - Innovation and Sustainability, was to raise an open reflection on what is new and useful in terminology work (innovation), and what remains valid (sustainability).
The first day of this year's summit focused on innovation, a topic of great interest nowadays, both in general and in the field of terminology, due to the changes brought about in the way we work with the advent of new technologies based on artificial intelligence.
After the opening ceremony entirely in Catalan by Natàlia Garriga (Minister of Culture of the Catalan Government), Teresa Cabré (President of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans) and Henrik Nilsson (President of EAFT), presentations were given to address the consequences of the changes, and challenges and opportunities these innovations bring with them. On this first day of the summit, several interesting and innovative projects in the field of the semantic web and ontologies were also presented. The future of terminology databases was also discussed.
The second day of the summit, which focused on sustainability, began with a round table discussion featuring five leading women in the field of terminology in Europe with many years of experience: Maja Bratanić (Croatia), Teresa Cabré (Catalonia), Susanne Lervad (Denmark), Fidelma Ní Ghallchobhair (Ireland) and Delyth Prys (Wales). This round table provided a unique opportunity to delve into the experience of these leading figures in terminology and their legacy, as well as to reflect on how their knowledge can be applied to meet the challenges of the future.
The main themes of the presentations on the day focused on sustainability were equity, diversity, inclusion, the treatment of gender in the various European languages, the loss of terminological domains and the Nordic coherence strategy.
The EAFT also gave out at the summit its International Terminology Awards, aimed at promoting research and development in the field of terminology and supporting future terminology activity. The winner of the ITA for the Master of Arts level was M. Araceli Losey León, and the ITA for the PhD level was awarded to Jorge M. Porras.
Also within the framework of the Summit, we had the great opportunity to host the presentation of the new book Terminology: Cognition, language and communication, by Teresa Cabré and Mercè Lorente. This is a new volume by Benjamins that collects the articles on terminology by Teresa Cabré from 1992 to 2009 and which, as the author pointed out, shows the evolution of her theoretical framework from the more rigid postulates of Wüster to the conception of the Communicative Theory of Terminology.
The full programme of the Summit can be found here.
Articles about the Summit
The Language Council of Norway published a travelogue from the Summit on its website. The article covers selected highlights from the Summit, such as the presentations of TERMCAT’s dictionary of terms related to sexual consent, Canada’s bilingual guide on equity, diversity and inclusion terminology and Michal Měchura’s machine translation bias removal tool Fairslator and its spin-off project Genderbase – a multilingual database of gender-sensitive terms
- Katalansk kvinnekamp og kanadisk inkludering – høgdepunkt frå eit terminologitoppmøte https://www.sprakradet.no/klarsprak/om-klarsprak/internasjonalt-arbeid/katalansk-kvinnekamp-og-kanadisk-inkludering/
When TERM comes as a surprise by Sandrine Grenier
Thank you!
The EAFT Board would like to take this opportunity to express our warm gratitude to all those who took part in this Summit and made it such an interesting and successful event in the field of terminology at European scale.
Stay tuned to this newsletter and the X social media profile (@_eaft) for information on the 2025 edition.
You can have a look here at the video and a picture gallery of the EAFT Summit 2023.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nf3HoPusCY
Many thanks to all participants for making the #EAFTSummit2023 possible!
Looking forward to #EAFTSummit2025!