
YourTerm CULT
Get to Terms with Culture, the Soul of Europe
Culture is one of the most important fields where multilingual communication meets the need of clear message to a very diverse audience.
This is why the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament included a project on cultural terminology in its new program Terminology without Borders.
The project on culture has four sub-projects:
European Capitals of Culture and Cultural Events
It is one of the most successful projects of the EU with various fields of activity topics that mobilize many people. The number of cultural and artistic projects drafted by the hundreds of cities bidding or participating since 1985 is huge and offers an ideal corpus for the extraction of terminology related to culture.
This project can be a helpful complementary tool to enable people coming from different countries understand each other.
Museums and Cultural Institutions
Terminology is extracted from corpora made with the texts that museums in any field of art or other activity publish on the web. This project can be useful for the multilingual digitalisation efforts of the museums, thanks also to a layer of plain terminology permitting communication with the visitors in clear language (e.g. through the audio guides)
The European Parliament has translated in all languages the material for The House of European History and created a Unit in the Directorate General of Translation dedicated to this permanent task, which will be one of our main partners in this project.
The texts translated by the Translation services of the European Parliament for the House of European History and the Parlamentarium form a unique corpus to create a cultural glossary in all EU official languages, since they have been translated in all of them. TermCoord has been creating a corpus of this texts and performing term extraction.
The archaeological vocabulary consists of specialised terms, sometimes represented by borrowings from ancient languages such as Latin and Greek, but also common words. Although some scientific communities felt the need to structure their knowledge in thesauri or ontologies, the scenario is still very fragmented. There is, therefore, the need to establish a terminological common core shared across languages which might represent the basis for improving scientific cooperation and advances in this field.
Sports
The notion of culture is widely used in the sociological, anthropological and historical study of sport. We inhabit a world in which sport is an international phenomenon and part of the social and cultural fabric of different localities, regions, and nations. It is therefore impossible to fully understand contemporary society and culture without acknowledging the place of sport. This multilingual glossary encompasses a broad range of sports and is aimed at encouraging European citizens to consider the meanings, symbols, rituals and power relations at play within any particular sport culture.
Music is a central discipline and branch of Culture and it is part of people’s lives in a constant and unconscious way. It is a very dynamic, ever-changing topic, as there are more and more singers and new genres, which is why its terminology is constantly expanding and developing. Musical traditions in different cultures are of great variety and lots are the interesting linguistic phenomena concerning this field. This multilingual glossary concerns music and musical instruments.