Passa ai contenuti principali

Trust the network - it probably knows more than you do

Social media and blogs enable us to easily focus on the latest news and trends on terminology, providing us with regular updates. 

This is the most important aspect emerged at the EAFT Terminology Summit, organised by TERMCAT, the Catalan Terminology Organisation in Barcelona, last November. The topic for 2014 was: How does social networking affect terminology work?

In recent years social networks have burst into life, and into terminology work, too. Terminological work and its dissemination are no exception. This is why the international terminology community opened a debate about the impact of social media on all spheres of terminology work, from research all the way through to dissemination.
According to Anita Nuopponen's presentation:
  • Social networks, if properly used, can be effectively used to find terminological resources.
  • Blogs are useful to provide own opinions, reflections and for being an optimal environment for discussing different points of view.
  • Twitter allows us to disseminate information, get visibility, link to useful information, follow interesting conferences we cannot attend through live-tweeting updates.
Related to Anita Nuoppen's presentation, there was a moment of great fun for me: she was listing the most reliable resources for terminology reseach and this list included, among the others, me!! I blushed and felt so honoured that she mentioned me as an excellent example of Twitter usage for terminology! 

Back to the conference, in brief, lessons learned:
  • Let's share knowledge! Disconnected experts are invisible to the network and irrelevant to the system (@ictlogist).
  • Let’s leverage the power of blogging! Blogs are usually more timely than newspapers in discussing new topics and concepts and crucial to raise awareness on the importance of terminology (@terminologia).
I provided a more detailed information about the Terminology Summit on the post: People have the power: the crowd-powered terminologist on the TermBloggers Lounge.

If you like this topic, you can find a lot of interesting suggestions in this post: Social media tips for translators and interpreters, by +Gala Gil Amat, where she explains her fresh and innovative approach to communication, that one that only ‘millenials’ have as natural talent.

For best practices on how to get the most from social networks as a translator, I invite you to read also:
Both post are on +Caroline Alberoni 's blog: Carol'sadventures in translation, a valuable resource providing tips and tricks for translators.


Commenti

Post popolari in questo blog

Little platoons

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society". “Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation". The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid. T

Microsoft Language Portal

Microsoft Language Portal:  a bi-lingual search portal for finding translations of key Microsoft terms and general IT terminology. It is aimed at international users and partners that need to know our terminology for globalization, localization, authoring and general discovery.  It contains approx. 25,000 defined terms, including English definitions, translated in up to 100 languages as well as the software translations for products like Windows, Office, SQL Server and many more.

Football or soccer, which came first?

With the World Cup underway in Brazil, a lot of people are questioning if we should refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? This is visible from the queries of the readers that access my blog. The most visited post ever is indeed “ Differenza tra football e soccer ” and since we are in the World Cup craze I think this topic is worth a post. According to a paper published in May by the University of Michigan and written by the sport economist Stefan Szymanski, "soccer" is a not a semantically bizarre American invention but a British import. Soccer comes from "association football" and the term was used in the UK to distinguish it from rugby football. In countries with other forms of football (USA, Australia) soccer became more generic, basically a synonym for 'football' in the international sense, to distinguish it from their domestic game. If the word "soccer" originated in Eng