Ülle Männart

TERMINOLOGY MANAGEMENT IN THE TRANSLATION ENVIRONMENT: ESTONIAN EXPERIENCE

The Estonian Legal Translation Centre (ELTC) is a state agency established in 1995 with the mission to translate EC legislation into Estonian and Estonian legislation into English. First, the paper will give a brief overview of the history and development of the organisation over the period of five and a half years with an emphasis on the changing role of the terminologist. Starting off as an administrator, someone who was responsible for establishing working methods and procedures, writing guidelines etc., the terminologist has developed into a terminology researcher / consultant / database manager, fully responsible for the terminological information processed and produced in the Centre.

Next, a closer look will be taken at the translation process at the ELTC and the functions of the members of the translation team - translator, terminologist, linguistic reviser, legal reviser and technical staff. Translation and terminology management tools at the disposal of the translation team will be introduced. All team members use Trados Translator's Workbench and MultiTerm in their work; the integration of these tools with the in-house applications will be discussed.

Further, the paper will focus on the challenges of terminology work in the two-directional translation environment. The terminology management approach adopted at the ELTC is essentially, and inevitably, translation-based (ad hoc) and descriptive. However, while doing their research, the terminologists try to apply the principles of systematic terminology research where possible since this is considered a necessary prerequisite for ensuring the quality of data. Combining the two approaches is one of the greatest challenges of the terminologists, especially in the situation where terms are extracted from texts belonging to a large variety of subject fields and deadlines are short. The equivalents established on the ad hoc basis are in need of regular revision.

In addition to supporting the translators and revisers in the translation process, the terminologists are responsible for managing the Centre's terminology database which is both an in-house tool for terminology storage and retrieval as well as a tool for terminology dissemination outside the Centre. The organisation of terminological information on the record will be analysed and examples of problems discussed.