Almost two decades after the inception of the Bologna Process, significant progress has been made towards the creation of an integrated European Higher Education Area (EHEA). As part of this process, universities have been under considerable pressure to increase their degree of internationalization, most notably by removing barriers that hamper student and staff mobility. Communication in a vehicular language features prominently among the means to pursue such objective. Results obtained so far in terms of the spread of English as a lingua franca of international institutional communication have been mixed, though, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, with Northern and Western European countries performing better than Southern European ones. Even when English contents are available, their quality may be less than ideal (Bernardini et al. 2010, Candel-Mora and Carrió-Pastor (2014). Among the multitude of “institutional academic” documents (Biber 2006) that need to be drafted in, or translated into English, course unit descriptions are especially key. These are texts providing prospective students with information on all the course units offered within degree programmes (e.g. disciplinary contents covered, credits awarded, learning outcomes, etc.), and their publication in bilingual form is required to obtain the ECTS label (ECTS Users’ Guide 2015: 54). Besides their central role for EU policies, the strain placed on academic staff for the production of course unit descriptions further motivates work on developing methods and tools to support their drafting/translation and the harmonization of their terminology. The present contribution has two objectives. First, it introduces the pool of corpora developed by CODE (“Cataloghi dell’Offerta Didattica in Europa”, Course Catalogues in Europe), a feasibility project based at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (University of Bologna, Forlì) aiming to explore terminological and phraseological features of course unit descriptions from native English and ELF countries. Second, it presents potential applications of the CODE corpora to a terminological task involving the revision and expansion of an Italian<=>English glossary compiled by the University of Bologna International Relations Office. Focusing on the Italian terms “corso” (~ “course”), “modulo” (~ “module”) and “insegnamento” (~ “teaching”), a procedure is proposed that consists in: a) assessing the degree of term variation in Italian texts and their English translations; b) validating the English equivalents by assessing their attestedness in native English and ELF texts from different EU countries, L1 language backgrounds, and universities; and c) finding collocates of the validated terms, and iteratively using these to isolate alternative terms, thus expanding and enriching the term set and its phraseology.
Terminology in European university settings. The case of course unit descriptions
FERRARESI, ADRIANO
2017
Abstract
Almost two decades after the inception of the Bologna Process, significant progress has been made towards the creation of an integrated European Higher Education Area (EHEA). As part of this process, universities have been under considerable pressure to increase their degree of internationalization, most notably by removing barriers that hamper student and staff mobility. Communication in a vehicular language features prominently among the means to pursue such objective. Results obtained so far in terms of the spread of English as a lingua franca of international institutional communication have been mixed, though, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, with Northern and Western European countries performing better than Southern European ones. Even when English contents are available, their quality may be less than ideal (Bernardini et al. 2010, Candel-Mora and Carrió-Pastor (2014). Among the multitude of “institutional academic” documents (Biber 2006) that need to be drafted in, or translated into English, course unit descriptions are especially key. These are texts providing prospective students with information on all the course units offered within degree programmes (e.g. disciplinary contents covered, credits awarded, learning outcomes, etc.), and their publication in bilingual form is required to obtain the ECTS label (ECTS Users’ Guide 2015: 54). Besides their central role for EU policies, the strain placed on academic staff for the production of course unit descriptions further motivates work on developing methods and tools to support their drafting/translation and the harmonization of their terminology. The present contribution has two objectives. First, it introduces the pool of corpora developed by CODE (“Cataloghi dell’Offerta Didattica in Europa”, Course Catalogues in Europe), a feasibility project based at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (University of Bologna, Forlì) aiming to explore terminological and phraseological features of course unit descriptions from native English and ELF countries. Second, it presents potential applications of the CODE corpora to a terminological task involving the revision and expansion of an Italian<=>English glossary compiled by the University of Bologna International Relations Office. Focusing on the Italian terms “corso” (~ “course”), “modulo” (~ “module”) and “insegnamento” (~ “teaching”), a procedure is proposed that consists in: a) assessing the degree of term variation in Italian texts and their English translations; b) validating the English equivalents by assessing their attestedness in native English and ELF texts from different EU countries, L1 language backgrounds, and universities; and c) finding collocates of the validated terms, and iteratively using these to isolate alternative terms, thus expanding and enriching the term set and its phraseology.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
