On 8 September the Norwegian national terminological infrastructure called Termportalen was launched at Språksamlingane, the national language collections, at the University of Bergen. The launch of Termportalen was celebrated in a seminar on the recent action plan on language for specific purposes in higher education issued by the Norwegian government in June this year.  

In the action plan Termportalen is singled out as the national infrastructure for developing and disseminating Norwegian terminology for higher education. In Norwegian language policy, higher education has been singled out as a particularly important sector to combat domain loss. One reason for this is the fact that the trend here is increasingly negative since English is used to an ever-increasing extent in teaching, curriculum and research. Another reason is that it is seems likely that if we can provide students with parallel language skills, including both English and Norwegian, in the subjects they study, these skills will come into use in society as they begin their careers in either teaching, health care, social services or trade and industry etc. The goal is to establish terminology groups that will develop parallel terminology in all domains that are relevant for higher education to ensure the availability of both Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) and English terminology to language users such as students, researchers, teachers, translators and to society at large. 

However, the scope of Termportalen goes beyond higher education as the goal is to add as many quality terminology resources as possible, including terminology from for example Standards Norway, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency and the Directorate of e-health, to name a few.  

Termportalen comprises both the staff of specialists who provide both digital and terminological services, including terminology training, as well as the actual portal, Termportalen.no. Fixed funding is received from the Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Culture and Equality, and the work is carried out in collaboration with the Norwegian language council and CLARINO, the Norwegian part of CLARIN.  

Recordings of the launch seminar [in Norwegian] in which both EAFT’s president Henrik Nilsson and Termcat’s Sandra Cuadrado [in English] offered useful perspectives from their experience can be found at: https://www.uib.no/aktuelt/164397/fr%C3%A5-ord-til-handling-tid-terminologiarbeid-i-akademia 

 
Termportalen is found at: https://www.termportalen.no/