Providing the terms: standardizing terms for education in Wales
Delyth Prys, University of Wales, Bangor Wales
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 33rd annual conference, University of Wales, Bangor,
1-3 July, 2003
Welsh-medium education in Wales in the 1950s and 1960s started on a very small scale, and at the instigation of parents and communities, not of politicians or the establishment (Williams, 2002). As a result, there was no advance planning, or preparation of resources, and certainly no budget set aside to develop Welsh-language school books and other materials. The burden of creating these materials fell on the small group of dedicated teachers actively engaged in pioneering Welsh-medium education. The need for appropriate vocabularies and terminologies was felt at an early date, especially to teach at secondary school level, and for general technical writing. For many years, the needs for Welsh terminology would be supplied by small booklets of English-Welsh terms arranged in alphabetical order, often with additional information such as parts of speech and plural forms included for the Welsh words.
The earliest of these booklets were published by the University of Wales Press, whose Committee of the Board of Celtic Studies undertook to collect and edit the terms. One of the earliest of this series, Termau Technegol, published in 1950, which contained a collection of terms from such dissimilar fields as aesthetics, music and chemistry, describes the process in its preface:
Wedi cael amryw gynigion ar lunio termau Cymraeg ar gyfer y rhai Saesneg, ymgymerodd Pwyllgor Iaith a Llên Bwrdd Gwybodau Celtaidd y Brifysgol â’u harchwilio’n fanwl o’r bron. Cysegrodd y pwyllgor fwy nag un eisteddiad go faith i’r pwrpas hwn.
(After having had many attempts at forming Welsh terms for the English ones, the Language and Literature Committee of the University’s’ Board of Celtic Studies undertook to examine them thoroughly. The committee devoted more than one long session to this end).
In fact, this description and others like it is a gross understatement of the labour and effort involved. Committee members were eminent academics, but their involvement with Welsh terminology was an additional burden on top of their everyday work commitments, undertaken for the love of the language, not because it was a part of their job description. R. Elwyn Hughes, who for many years chaired a technical terminology panel set up by the Language and Literature Committee, once described how this panel would gather together on Saturday mornings in his house, coffee and biscuits provided by himself, in order to work on these terminology lists. Despite this early work being undertaken to a large extent as a voluntary effort, it was however by no means amateurish. Hughes himself, in his introduction to a collection of nineteenth century of Welsh language scientific writings (1990) describes the necessary principles for the formulation of sound technical terms. Based on the French work of Guyton de Morveau, Methode de nomenclature chimique, which through its English translation had had a profound effect on the development of English language terminology, the main criteria for technical terminology were deemed to be (i) that the new terms should be scientifically meaningful, and portray something of the nature of the concept it represented, (ii) that it was better to choose a ‘neutral’ term, rather than one which could be misleading or inaccurate, and (iii) that the new term should conform to the structure and characteristics of the ‘natural’ language.
These principles were refined and adapted by the Committee for its own work with Welsh terminology. In the preface to its Termau Ffiseg a Mathemateg (1965) we find twelve basic principles listed. These include a preference over words already existing in the language over the coining of new words, the differentiation of two similar, but scientifically distinct concepts by the use of two different terms, one of which might be familiar in non-technical language, whilst the other might be less familiar. If new words had to be coined, their meaning should be fairly obvious from the elements contained in them. New words could be formed by using prefixes, suffixes, and so on, but also by combining two words to form new ones. Words could be borrowed from other languages, notably from English, Latin and Greek, with their orthography adapted to Welsh pronunciation and spelling. International symbols should be kept, as should the familiar British conventions of writing equations, and, with a few exceptions, the spelling of proper nouns (usually names of people whose discoveries had been named after them) in terms and international conventions in their abbreviations.
These criteria formed a sound basis for future terminological work in the Welsh language, and with a few changes, mainly in order to conform to new international guidelines, are still followed in our terminology work today. The most perceptive comments in this introduction concern the potential for change in the accepted vocabulary, and that change is an indication that the language is actually being used as a means of communication.
Nid yw’r pwyllgor yn awgrymu fod hon yn eirfa derfynol ac nad oes newid i fod arni. Os byth y ceir geirfa derfynol, fel canlyniad i ymarfer ac ysgrifennu cyson am gyfnod gweddol faith y daw hi. Wrth ei defnyddio yr ennill gair ei blwyf, ac os daw geiriau eraill i ddisodli rhai o’r geiriau a awgrymir yma, croesewir hwy’n galonogol gan holl aelodau’r pwyllgor fel arwydd o fywiogrwydd yr iaith.
(The committee does not suggest that this vocabulary is final and that it has to remain unchanged. If a finalized vocabulary is ever achieved, it will come as a result of constant practise and writing over a fairly considerable period of time. Words become accepted through use, and if other words come to displace some of the words suggested here, they will wholeheartedly be welcomed by all the committee members as signs of vitality of the language).
When those words were written it was by no means certain that Welsh would develop as an important means of communication for education in Wales. The growth in demand for Welsh-medium education, not only from Welsh-speaking parents and in Welsh-speaking areas, but also the unexpected demand from non-Welsh speaking parents and from Anglicized areas of Wales certainly contributed to the vitality of the language. This included the development of appropriate terminology, discourse and language register to discuss technical concepts within Welsh-medium education.
Terminology activity within the education sector in Wales increased further in the 1970s and 1980s. The Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC) now undertook to publish bilingual terminology lists for individual school subjects. The Board of Celtic Studies continued its activities during this period, concentrating for the most part on non-school subjects, taught only at university level, in order to provide a full coverage of Welsh terminology. A bibliography of terminology dictionaries (Prys, Jones and ap Emlyn), gives a comprehensive listing of these and other specialist dictionaries published during this period and is evidence of the vitality of terminology activity in Wales at that time.
However, most of the terminology dictionaries published were small, containing only some 1000 to 1500 terms each. There was also inconsistency between terms used, as might be expected between lists produced by independent subject-specific committees. The advent of a national curriculum, with its attendant need for resources to support its teaching through the medium of Welsh, gave the opportunity to reassess and improve terminological resources. In 1993 the School Curriculum Authority (latter superseded in Wales by ACCAC, the Qualifications, Curriculum and Assessment Authority for Wales), gave out a tender to standardize terminology in the Welsh language for the schools of Wales. This was originally conceived of as separate dictionaries for each school subject, but was later amended to provide one comprehensive English-Welsh and Welsh-English terminology dictionary which would cover all classroom needs for the teaching of science, mathematics, art, music, technology, information technology, physical education, religious studies, history, geography, and the general administration of education for children up to the age of 16 in the schools of Wales.
Two major innovations were introduced with this project, both to have long-term effect on the development of terminology work in Wales. The first was the requirement, given in the original specifications, that terms had to be standardized, across and within subjects, according to objective criteria. The second was that computer databases had to be employed to hold the terminology records.
Although terminologists from the earliest days had been careful to base their choice of terms on certain common principles, the development of international standards for terminology, as developed by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) since its establishment in 1947, had not been used as guidelines in Wales. Despite terminologists’ willingness to accept foreign borrowings under certain conditions, the perspective in Wales had been on the need to develop appropriate technical vocabulary for the Welsh language to counteract the trend to borrow English words. This tendency towards linguistic purism is a common element in many minority languages living in the shadow of stronger, encroaching languages (Thomas, 1991). However, this leads to terminology work being viewed as necessary only for smaller, or endangered languages, and misses out on the global activity in standardizing activity in English, French, Spanish and other major languages to enable detailed technical communication within and between these languages. The adoption of relevant ISO standards for Welsh terminology work, and their specific adaptation for the needs of the Welsh language began with the ACCAC project, and has been crucial in mainstreaming Welsh terminology work and establishing standardization criteria in step with current international best practice.
The two main standards adopted for Welsh terminology work were ISO 704 Terminology work – Principles and methods, and ISO 860 Terminology work – Harmonization of concepts and terms. According to standard 704 the main criteria for standardized terms are that they should be linguistically correct, reflect the characteristics of the concept, be concise, be productive of other linguistic forms, and be monosemous. These then became the basis of the work done on standardizing Welsh terminology for ACCAC (Jones, 2000), which was published as a comprehensive English-Welsh and Welsh-English dictionary containing over 35000 entries (Prys and Jones, 1998). This first edition was a paper-based dictionary, but an amended and expanded version was published on CD format two years later.
The CD version of the dictionary was made possible because of the original requirement that the whole project be developed using computer databases. Separate fields in the database held different types of information such as the term in English, its equivalent in Welsh, part of speech, plural form, disambiguator, and so on. This made it easy to produce word lists arranged alphabetically in English-Welsh or Welsh-English as needed. Additional fields, such as notes on the choice of terms, could be kept in the database without being exported to the published versions. More importantly perhaps holding this information in an accessible electronic format made it easy, and relatively inexpensive, to use the data with other applications which were being developed concurrently for the Welsh language (Prys and Morgan, 2000). These included a Welsh lemmatizer, which would demutate, depluralize and deconjugate words, finding the form given in the dictionary entry and its English equivalents. Mutations are a specific feature of the Celtic languages where the initial letter of a word can change, following certain grammar rules. This makes it difficult, especially for those learning Welsh as a second language, to find a Welsh word in a dictionary arranged in the traditional manner according to alphabetic principles. Other features of Welsh grammar, such as irregular plural forms and verb conjugations, also make it difficult for the uninitiated to work back to the header word which they need to look up in the dictionary to find its English equivalent. The Welsh lemmatizer, used in the CD version of the terminology dictionary, overcame this problem very effectively.
Another important advance, due partly to the concept-based approach of the terminology work, but also to the new facility of using electronic methods to store and search data, was that terminology entries were no longer based on single word terms, but that terms containing two or three words, or even longer phrases, were shown as technical terms in their own right, and so appeared as independent header words. Thus a term such as ‘free kick’ does not appear as a sub-entry under ‘free’ or under ‘kick’, but as an entry in its own right. As well as guarding the integrity of the concept it guides the user away from trying to translate each word within the term separately, and thereby mistranslating it. After all, the word ‘free’ is used for two distinct concepts in English: ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’ and ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’. These concepts are represented by two different words in Welsh, but choosing the right one to use to translate the ‘free’ in ‘free kick’ is difficult without understanding the meaning of this specialized rugby term. Again, working in a computer database, where each concept has its own entry, and outputting to a sophisticated electronic dictionary which can be set to display either single words or lists of terms containing those words, was a significant step forward.
The original project to produce a standardized terminology dictionary for the schools of Wales was awarded to the School of Education at the University of Wales, Bangor. This led directly to the establishment of a Centre for the Standardization of Welsh Terminology at the university, since it was deemed that the expertise built up during the course of the project was too valuable to be dispersed once it drew to a close. During the following years the Centre has been called upon not only to produce a whole series of standardized terminology dictionaries in various fields (see under Llyfryddiaeth on the e-Gymraeg web site) but has also reports and training for government and other public and private bodies who have had a need to operate within a technical bilingual environment. In 2001, following reorganization, the Centre became part of a new e-Gymraeg (e-Welsh) unit at Canolfan Bedwyr in the university. This unit combines the terminology work with language engineering developments for Welsh, producing, for example, spelling and grammar checkers such as CySill, and the language tools within Microsoft Office XP.
In 2002, the Centre won a new tender from ACCAC to produce a further dictionary of standardized Welsh terminology. This dictionary is to include terms used in all post 16 education in Wales, encompassing both the traditional A level syllabuses and the new vocational qualifications. Vocational subjects such as building, catering, mechanics, tourism and leisure, have up until now been the poor relations in terms of provision of Welsh terminology. However, they are widely taught through the medium of Welsh, or bilingually, and syllabuses and exam papers have been provided in Welsh by many examination boards. A measure of the advance in the handling of electronic data during the last ten years is the way terminology extraction is now a semi-automated process. Gone are the days when staff used to read paper documents armed with a highlighter pen in order to pick out relevant terms, and then input them manually into the database. Now the electronic documents are run through the terminology extraction programs, and exported automatically to a database. However, human expertise is still needed in the standardization process, and here the language and software experts at the Centre are aided by various subject specialists, according to the terminology field under discussion. This is because the terminology work undertaken at the Centre is still concept-based, and the first requirement for standardization is a thorough understanding of the concept itself. This is provided by educators who teach in the various specialist areas, and developing terminology, at its best, is a partnership between subject specialists and linguists.
This paper has concentrated on the introduction of standardized Welsh-language terminology, first at primary and secondary school level, and then at further education level. However, it is no less relevant for adult education. Care was taken from the outset that there would be no ‘talking down’ or oversimplification in the production of Welsh terminology for schools. There are occasions where a technical language register is inappropriate, and where teachers may wish to use non-technical language. However, education is often concerned with teaching and learning specific technical concepts such as kilogram, free kick, nuclear fusion, slip hemming stitch, equity law, and so on. Here both educators and educated need clarity, and confidence in the correctness and appropriateness of the terms. One reason quoted for the apparent success of bilingual education is that bilingual children have two linguistic labels on a concept, and are therefore better able to grasp its meaning (Baker and Jones, 1998). There is no doubt as to the success of bilingual education in Wales, and if supplying appropriate terminology has had a small part to play in that, then it has achieved its aim. Terminology work is now a global activity, and the standardization of terms for Welsh-medium education should be seen in that international context.