Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament

The Terminology Coordination Unit (TermCoord) is a supporting unit to the translation units of the Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD) of the European Parliament. TermCoord was created in 2008 to stimulate and coordinate the terminology work of the 24 translation units of the European Parliament in Luxembourg.

It provides the terminologists and translators with tools, resources, support and training to facilitate their daily translation tasks. TermCoord also works to increase the European Parliament’s inter-institutional contribution to the EU terminology database IATE.

Today’s European Union legislation is drafted in 24 official languages, with each language version considered authentic. Thus, translation is an integral part in the process of drafting and adopting legal acts. The European Institutions employ many hundreds of translators to cover the major part of these translation needs and the 552 possible language combinations. The translation system must be regularly brought into line with constantly evolving legislative procedures and technology.

For this reason, the importance of terminology has become increasingly clear. Back when the European Parliament worked with less than ten official languages a Terminology Division was created with the aim of collecting glossaries and other terminology material. Later on, this division was combined with the IT service, resulting in the creation of the Euterpe database (European Terminology for the European Parliament).

Alongside the development of inter-institutional translation memory systems (internal Euramis), previously separate resources such as the Commission’s Eurodicautom and Parliament’s Euterpe, were merged into the common inter-institutional terminology database IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe), which has been used by the EU’s translation services since summer 2004. IATE was made available to the general public in June 2007. Today the database contains roughly 8.7 million terms and on its public version it receives on average 5000 queries per hour from all over the world.

In 2008, Parliament decided to set up a service to coordinate all issues related to the IATE database and the terminology work carried out in the translation units. At the start, the service was staffed by three permanent officials. The officials recruited later on to the unit through internal competitions have been assigned specific tasks.

The permanent staff, currently numbering ten officials, is assisted by both graduate and undergraduate trainees, who contribute to the achievements of the unit by using their specialised knowledge and skills during a traineeship period of 1–6 months.

Terminology coordination involves constant cooperation with a network of about 100 terminologists responsible for terminology matters in their translation units and carrying out terminology assignments set by TermCoord; volunteer groups working on certain projects; and rotating terminologists seconded to the unit for three months. The rotating terminologists’ main responsibilities include participating in TermCoord’s work on IATE, in particular doing updates in their native language, and liaising with the translation units to identify best practices.

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