I hope that this is meant at least partially as a tongue in cheek
analogy!
As a European citizen I would be really depressed to learn that all the
terminology in the constitution was entirely constructed as a kind of
brand-identification. Am I hopelessly naive in thinking that some at
least of the terms relate to concepts that do actually exist in all
the languages of the EU?
Of course, specific terminology with a specific Euro-flavour does
exist, and existing corpus methods of terminology-extraction surely are
very good at identifying it. I don't see any evidence for the assertion
that corpora don't exist for most of the "newish" EU languages: on the
contrary, it's in that area that the last few years have seen enormous
expansion.
Lou
On 15 May 2005, at 14:03, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Adam,
>
> These issues are typical of a large number of applications.
> The current discussion is about EU documents, but very
> similar issues arise in commercial applications.
>
> For example, a multinational company X, which has its roots
> in country A, will typically have most documents written in
> the language of A. Large numbers of new terms that refer to
> X's products and their novel features will be coined in terms
> of the A lexicon, and corresponding terms will have to be
> coined in each of the languages for each of the markets
> to which X sells their products. Furthermore, the product
> developers will constantly be extending the terminology,
> coining new terms, and modifying the meanings of old terms
> even while terminologists are trying to define equivalents.
>
> Replace the term "EU" with "market" and the same problems
> exist in commercial applications:
>
> > I'm not sure that corpus methods are very relevant.
> > For new and newish EU languages, the corpora don't exist
> > yet or where they do, are likely to be full of
> > inconsistencies and not dependable.
>
> The denotation of the term "corpus methods" changes with
> every new method that anyone invents. If the current methods
> can't handle problems of this sort, that's an important
> challenge for researchers to develop new ones.
>
> John Sowa
>
>
>
From the Macmini at Burnard Towers
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