The annual meeting of the UIC Terminology Group was held in Bratislava from 15 – 16 October 2014 at the invitation of ZSSK (Slovak passenger train operator). The Terminology Group, which is composed of terminologists, translators, international affairs managers and technical experts from various UIC member railways, was welcomed by Mr Lubomir Hradisky, Head of International Relations Department at ZSSK. He placed particular emphasis on the fact that a harmonised terminology was needed in order to achieve good cooperation in the field of railways.
Within the framework of the Terminology Group, UIC coordinates the translation work for 25 languages and is in charge of updating the RailLexic database in English, French and German. The translations into all the other languages are being done by the members of the group, who come from over 20 different railway companies. The same database is used for creating the RailLexic CD-ROM with so far 22 languages and editing the trilingual UIC Railway Dictionary containing English, French and German.
This year’s Terminology Group meeting served as a forum to exchange the latest developments and best practices in the field of terminology. A presentation by Tom Winter from DB Language Services gave participants a precious insight into how terminology work was done at DB.
Besides exchanging experiences in the field of terminology, sharing different ways of organising the translation process for RailLexic and setting priorities for new terminology work, the main focus at this year’s Terminology Group Meeting was the new RailLexic online version which had been presented at the meeting. Furthermore, a lively discussion took place with regard to the time frame for the translation of terms and consequently the publishing of the next RailLexic edition in 2015.
The workshop on the second day gave participants the opportunity to discuss in detail functionalities and features of the web-based tool for terminology input. This interface which was created specifically to meet the needs of the Terminology Group members not only helps to retrieve terms and definitions, but also to input them, to export them and to search for terms not yet translated.
