Courses in Terminology Management for Interpreters

Teachers as well as students should be familiar with principles and methods of terminology and terminology management. They should make sure that they know the contents of all eCoLoTrain terminology courses.

In the ideal case, a PC lab equipped with enough computers for all students, with an Internet connection, a terminology management tool, a word processor, CD-ROM dictionaries, etc.

The main learning objective of this course is to learn how to perform terminology work for interpreting jobs.

• Courses on terminology management for interpreters can be planned for one semester and can be held regularly - e.g. two hours per week – or in seminars – for example, four-hour seminars every two weeks. This would depend on the time dedicated to them in the relevant study courses – Bachelors (BA), Masters (MA), etc.
• Depending on course objectives and students’ level, teachers can point out which parts of eCoLoTrain courses are relevant for exercising terminology for interpreters, for example, adding entries, modifying existing entries, importing/exporting entries, etc.

• The tasks described in the scenarios below are to be used during or for the preparation of interpreting classes.
• In this scenario, students will play the role of freelance interpreters who have to maintain their own local database for interpreting jobs. Teachers will assist students in creating their terminology databases, in defining appropriate data categories for interpreting purposes and input models according to students' language pairs, etc.
• As all the databases will be topic-oriented, a lot of attention will be paid to the setting up of the database and its fields – domain, client, date, context, etc. This is crucial as, according to the specific domain, interpreters may want to export certain entries from their databases (for example, they may want to export only entries created for a particular client).
• As a result, students will have to create subject specific entries and learn to define and use filters, for exporting subject specific alphabetical lists out of their termbases, for example.
• Each student (or group of students) is responsible for updating his/her own database with their own materials, which involves adding new entries, modifying existing entries, adding contextual information etc.
• If there are pre-existing lists of vocabulary or glossaries, for example in MS Excel tables, students will have to import terminology into their local databases. Also, they may want to know how to export data from the terminology tool to more popular formats such as MS Word if they want to use a paper version in their booth. These skills might prove useful if they want to use other devices such as a palmtop device during an interpreting job and want to export the entries from their terminology management tool to it.
• Finally, if all students agree, according to their language pairs, subject fields, etc., teachers could merge students’ databases into a single, larger one, which can be made available for all students or used for teaching purposes.

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