Do you speak Cernese?
The CERN Translation Service's bilingual glossary, comprising over 4000 entries relating to specific terms used in the Laboratory, can now be accessed on-line via the Web.
Members of the Translation and Minutes Service. First row, from left to right : François Siohan, Blandine Gallone, Rosmarie Meyer and Odile Martin. Second row, from left to right : Jean-Paul Cazals, Bernie Meares, Lisa Morris, Martine Dubois, Brigitte Lorenz and John Pym.
Buckyball, tunnel de rétraction, crumble theory, pompe centrifuge à volute, culvert... Would you know how to translate these terms into French or English*? You probably won't even find them in a dictionary! It's a fact of life that organisations like CERN employ very specialised terminology, and of course, since our Organization has two official languages, it is faced with the daily task of having to find equivalents for often abstruse terms in French or English.
This is just one of the tasks of the Translation and Minutes Service (AS-TM), which, as its name implies, include writing minutes for official meetings as well as translating a wide variety of official texts, ranging from documents for the Council and its Committees to administrative procedures and specifications, press releases and articles for the CERN Courier and the Weekly Bulletin into English and French. In the course of their work, TM's translators often have to embark upon veritable terminology crusades, consulting specialised dictionaries, trawling through glossaries on the Web, and picking the brains of the relevant CERN specialist. Many such terms are bound to arise again at some later date, so in order to save themselves and their colleagues precious time in the future, the translators have built up their very own bilingual glossary, an invaluable tool which today contains more than 4,000 entries and is constantly growing as each translator unearths yet another new term. But finding the «mot juste» is only the beginning of their work, which often entails considerable background research and discussion with authors and experts within the Organization to ensure the best possible final product.
The AS-TM glossary can now be accessed by anybody working on the CERN site. Just set your browser to the Translation Group's new web-site and click on «Bilingual Glossary».
All visitors to the TM Glossary are encouraged to send in any remarks on the glossary's contents or propose new terms. An open invitation to all the linguists among you!
* To find out how to translate these terms, just go to the Translation Service's on-line glossary.
