Perspective Paper: Terminology

PERSPECTIVE PAPER: TERMINOLOGY*
J. Goetschalckx
Commission of the European Communities
Terminology uses both linguistic and documentation techniques. However, it is a branch oflinguistics and I do not think documentation could do without terminology.
We terminologists are somehow halfway between these two disciplines. As we know perhaps
more about linguistics than many documentalists do and more about documentation thanmost linguists do, it would be fortunate if we could form a link between the two.
As head of the terminology office of the Commission of the European Communities in
Luxembourg, working in close cooperation with the General Directorate XIII, "Scientificand Technical Information and Information Management," I have a personal interest inthese matters. We have to cope daily with the problem of multilingualism in
documentation and the setting up of a documentation system that provides terminologicalinformation.
As far as I, a documentalist, am concerned, I distinguish two types of documentation
systems:
1. Systems based on keyword or descriptor access.
2. Systems based on title or abstract access.
The first case is purely a matter of terminology. The only problem is to try to establish
some compatibility between the real terminological usage of the professional in the field
concerned, on the one hand, and the need for a coherent system of descriptors for the
documentalist, on the other.
In the second case, it is necessary to give more than just terminology, although even here
terminology will be the major factor.
In the terminology offices of the Commission of the European Communities in
Luxembourg and Brussels, the terminological information put into the computer of theCommission's terminology bank (Goetschalckx, 1975) is preferably presented in aphraseological form. We feel that this generally guarantees a greater accuracy at theretrieval level. Moreover, it provides the translator with a good example for the use of theterm he was looking for, both from the technical point of view and the linguistic point ofview.

•This paper reflects remarks made by the author at the workshop.

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It was not distributed in advanceJ. Goetschalckx
This technique has, however, its weak point. Terms put into the system in a phraseologicalform are not always in their standard form. For inflecting languages such as German andDanish, where the article is a kind of suffix, the terms are almost never in their standard
form. The well-known technique used to deal with this kind of problem is, of course,truncation.
For reasons of efficiency, on the one hand, and user appeal, on the other, we are working
out a batch processing system and an on-line retrieval procedure which will enable anytranslator to put his own questions to the data bank without have to learn and practiceseveral tricky manipulations.
Translators are allergic to this kind of thing.
To meet the need for automatic devices, we are trying to develop an automatic truncation
procedure.
Until now, this procedure has been of a mathematical type, so it varies
according to the length of the words. It is quite clear that it will be necessary to develop alinguistic instrument for this operation. A first step could be an automatic truncation
system based on linguistic criteria. The second step should be a morphological reduction
system.
As soon as the Euronet project comes into effect, it will be necessary to provide any user
wanting to consult a data bank in another country and another language with all the
linguistic instruments necessary to formulate an adequate question on the basis of what theuser wants to ask in his own language. This may simply be a series of descriptors, but it
may also come to a translation - - if possible, a machine translation - - of the originalquestion.
There is clearly a need for contributions from theoretical or formal linguistics both indocumentation and in terminology, since the latter is itself a tool for documentalists.

Reference
Goetschalckx, J. "Practical Aspects of Terminology Work." Second
Colloquium on Terminology, Lac Delage, 5-8 October 1975.

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