Abstract

The paper will focus on the integration of terminology training in education programmes for translators and inter-preters. Concrete plans of courses containing terminology training at various levels at the Copen-hagen Business School will be presented in detail and the paper will provide an overview of various ways to integrate terminology training into language education programmes.

1. The general structure of the language education programmes at CBS

This section provides an overview of three different study programmes in the Faculty of Language at the Copenhagen Business School; section 2 will focus on the terminology components of each programme.

1.1 The Business Language Programme

The BA programme comprises two foreign languages plus a number of supplementary disciplines, as can be seen in table 1. Among these are business economics, elementary business law and language technology (9 ECTS), which includes some terminology training.

The BA programme in business language includes various specialisations covering half of the student's work load during the last year of the programme (30 ECTS). Each specialisation is followed by its own master's level programme. The master's programmes include Translation and Interpretation, Compu-ta-tio-nal Linguistics and Communications.

1.1.1 Specialisation in LSP: technical and legal language & MA in Translation and Interpretation

At the BA level, the specialisation comprises studies in Language for Specific Purposes (technical and legal) of one of the foreign languages. Some terminology training is embedded in either the technical or the legal language course.

A student who earns a BA with a specialisation in LSP can go on to do the master's programme in translation and interpretation in one foreign language. Depending on the language studied, various terminology courses are offered, and in some of the language programmes, students have to write terminological entries for their own databases. For all language students at the MA level, an optional terminology course is offered.

Table 1: BA in Business Language

1.1.2 Specialisation in IT and Language & MA in Computational Linguistics

This specialisation comprises courses in terminology, databases and machine translation. The terminology course also contains some lexicography. Students with this specialisation can go on to do the master's programme in computational linguistics, where more theoretic issues in terminology are studied and discussed.

1.1.3 Specialisation in International Marketing & MA in International Business Communication

These programmes do not include terminology training, but the importance of terminology work for communication and language production is recognised.

1.2 BA in Information Technology and English

This is a new 3-year study programme which starts in September 1999. It combines the study of English (90 ECTS) with Computational Linguistics (90 ECTS). The BA can be followed by one of two MA-programmes: the above mentioned MA-programme in translation and interpretation in English, and a new MA-programme in computational linguistics.

The BA programme explicitly includes a course in terminology (2nd and 3rd semester), and another course in translation and lexicography (3rd semester). Later courses in LSP (primarily in the language of economics) include terminology work.

1.3 Master's of Language Administration

This is another new study programme offered to persons holding a BA in a language or communication programme followed by three years of relevant work experience. The programme will focus on language and text production in (business) organisations, and management of the text production process is a central theme. Other themes to be addressed include quality, language policy, methods and technologies for text production, standards and formats for handling documents (SGML, XML), terminology, terminology databases, machine translation and translation memories. In this programme we plan to have invited speakers and guest lecturers from (business) organisations and other institutions, from both Denmark and abroad.

2. Details of the terminology courses within the different education programmes

2.1 BA in Business Language

The course in Language Technology consists of two parts as shown in table 2. The first part takes place in the 1st semester of the programme. It is an introduction to the Internet and to elementary language technology products such as electronic dictionaries and spelling checkers.

The second part takes place in the 4th semester. It comprises terminology work, updates and searches in DANTERMCBS and work with MultiTerm. The terminology component includes construction of concept systems, definition writing and the basic DANTERM record structure. DANTERMCBS is a terminology database application developed in Access at CBS (see Hull, Madsen & Thomsen (1998) for details). The literature for this course is all in Danish and is produced at the Copenhagen Business School especially for this course.. (Ruding & Sielemann 1997, Madsen 1997, Thomsen 1999, Boje 1998, Sørensen 1998).

Table 2: Curriculum of the Language Technology course

The final examination includes the construction of a concept system and 3-4 terminographic units based on 2-3 pages of Danish text. Detailed examples can be found in Thomsen (1999).

The integration of terminology training into the general BA study programme is not sufficient. At present one exercise involving texts on types of business organisations from each of the language programmes is used in the course, but it is still not clear to students that the terminological methods taught to them in this course can also be used in their language studies. In particular, those students (40%) who choose the specialisation in international marketing need further instruction with regard to the need for terminology work in monolingual language production.

2.1.1 Specialisation in LSP: technical and legal language & MA in Translation and Interpretation

On the BA with a Specialisation in LSP and on the MA in Translation and Interpretation, the terminological component varies with the language studied, as can be seen in table 3.

Table 3: BA specialisations and MA programmes

Previously, some lectures for all the students on these specalisations were given, but this was not satisfactory. The goal of the lectures was to elaborate on the elementary terminological knowledge acquired by students in the language technology course the year before, but for economic reasons, the lectures were given to 150-200 students in one lecture hall. It was therefore impossible to include exercises and students did not benefit from the lectures.

Instead of the lectures, teachers in legal and technical language now include some terminology work in their disciplines, and in Russian, terminological theory is studied using the textbook Smith (1998).

At the master's level, each language has its own study programme and again the amount of terminology varies. In some language programmes, students have to work on data for their own individual terminology database, which is evaluated at the end of the 2-year programme. In other programmes, terminological working methods are used in some disciplines without any further theoretical teaching.

For all MA students, an optional terminology course is offered, and in all programmes the master's thesis can consist of a terminology project which includes a discussion of some theoretical issue.

2.1.2 Specialisation in IT and Language & MA in Computational Linguistics

The terminology course at the BA level comprises extended training in terminology work, including discussions about the form of definitions, the nature of the term, meaning, types of relations between concepts, etc. The course also includes some lexicography, and a taxonomy of lexical information categories is introduced as a tool for designing databases for terminological and lexicographic databases (DS 2394-1). A Danish textbook (Madsen 1999) is used. See tables 4a and b for an outline of the curriculum.

The course is highly integrated with a course in databases where students construct an Access database for terminology work, similar to DANTERMCBS.

Table 4a: Curriculum of Terminology and LSP in the BA-specialisation

Table 4b: Curriculum of Terminology and LSP in the BA-specialisation

The final exam consists of a project where students may choose either to improve the terminology database application which they developed during the database course and then apply it to a small terminology project chosen by themselves, or to create a database for some printed dictionary or encyclopedia.

2.3 BA in IT and English

In this programme, a course similar to the one described above for the specialisation in IT and Language is included, but at an earlier stage, namely during the 2nd and the 3rd term. In this way the students' knowledge of terminological working methods can be drawn upon at later stages in their English studies, and some of the later English courses do include terminology work. In this programme we hope to see a better integration between the methodological course and the language courses where the methods are to be applied.

2.4 Master's of Language Administration

In this programme, terminology and databases is integrated into one course. The focus is on the develop-ment of adequate terms, standardisation, customer needs and wants, and the language policy of an organisation in general. In addition, aspects such as management of terminology use, of terminology collections and the like will be addressed. Textbooks will generally be the same as those used for the BA in IT and English.

Table 5: Curriculum of Terminology & Databases of the MLA-programme

3. Concluding remarks

In this paper I have described how and to what extent terminology training is integrated into the language programmes at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). There is a long tradition of teaching terminology at the CBS, but there are still problems that need to be faced. One is to bring terminology training up to the same level in all language programmes, and another major problem is finding a way to motivate those BA students who choose the specialisation in international marketing.

4. References

Boje, Frede (1998): Søgning og indtastning i DANTERMCBS - Manual med øvelser. VISTA Manual nr.8, 2.edition. VISTA, Copenhagen Business School.

DS 2394-1: Lexical data collections - Description of data categories and data structure - Part 1: Taxonomy for the classification of information types. Dansk Standard, Copenhagen.

Hull, Antohny; Madsen, Bodil Nistrup & Thomsen, Hanne Erdman (1998): DANTERMCBS for Everyone. In: Terminology in Advanced Microcomputer Applications. Proceedings of the Fourth TermNet Symposium / TAMA '98. Vienna: TermNet.

Madsen, Bodil Nistrup (1997): Termbasers opbygning og indhold. Copenhagen Business School.

Madsen, Bodil Nistrup (1999a): Terminologi 1: Principper og metoder. Copenhagen, GAD.

Madsen, Bodil Nistrup (1999b): Terminologi 2: eksempler og øvelser. Copenhagen, GAD.

Ruding, Annemette & Sielemann, Ann June (1997): Introduktion til sprogteknologi. Copenhagen Business School.

Smith, Viktor (1998): Termen. Bind II i serien: Teknik, Teknisk sprog, Teknisk oversættelse: En introduktion med afsæt i dansk og russisk. Copenhagen Business School.

Sørensen, Henrik Selsøe (1998): MultiTerm '95 Plus! - Kortfattet manual med øvelser. VISTA manual nr. 7, Copenhagen Business School.

Thomsen, Hanne Erdman (1999): Terminologiske øvelser. Copenhagen Business School.