Report on the use of Lexicons at the ESF 2006

LEXICONS

The Lexicons team for the 4th ESF started intensive and systematic work about three months before the forum took place. The material used was the 26 glossaries already uploaded on the website, containing about 2,000 terms covering all subject areas of the forum. Most glossaries were available in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, whereas there were very few in Catalan, Basque, Russian, Hungarian and Greek.

The targets initially set, when we started work on the lexicons in September 2005, were to check the translation of the glossaries available, in as many languages as possible and, following this, to enrich them by adding more Greek terms per subject area. The following were done to achieve the initial target:
1) Some newspapers and magazines were scanned with the result of 500 terms being indexed. These terms are electronically available.
2) There was a suggestion to invite the various political organizations and teams of various interests in the areas covered in the fora, such as the Environment, Human Rights, etc, to record the particular terminology they use and make it available to us for the enhancement of the glossaries.

However, these activities were suspended, due to the insufficient number of people involved in setting them in motion, in addition to the fact that there was no response by the various organizations to the invitation for the recording of their terminology. The outcome of this initial stage was the translation of 8 out of the 26 glossaries into Greek.

In February 2006, the second stage of the work for the setting up of the lexicon team began, at an increased pace this time. About 10 people responded to the invitation and formed a team which took up the work from where it was left off, with the new target to translate all glossaries in all 20 (approx.) languages to be used in the Athens Forum. Initially the team set out working on the Greek translations of the terms, while few glossaries were also translated in one or two additional languages. Work was distributed by e-mail, on the TransTrad model, and the job was undertaken by whoever was available. When the Greek translations were ready we had intended to upload the new files on the babels website and to invite people registered with babels-org, babels-el, esf and parla to participate in the translation and proofreading of the glossaries into the rest of the languages too.

The time required for this work turned out to be much longer than we had expected, also given the various problems and setbacks ensuing this sort of free and participatory practices. The result was the achievement of only our immediate target which was to translate all glossaries into Greek and then to upload them on the website in open office and pdf formats. The only additional target that was met was the editing of all terminology in German by a native speaker of German.

Recommendations to be put into effect by the next forum:
1) checking the translation of the titles of the workshops that took place during the forum and indexing the terminology with the aim of enhancing the glossaries
2) editing the glossaries translated into Greek
3) inviting more people by TransTrad or directly from the babels lists to participate in translating the glossaries in the rest of the languages used in the Athens Forum.

Maria Roussou

Babels-el