| 1. Objectives of the Project
Technical terms mean words or expressions used by a particular profession or group of people who share same interest in a particular subject. In a broader sense they mean any words or expressions used in general professional circles, but in a narrow sense, they mean the terminologies used and understood by particular professionals such as artists, scientists, doctors, lawyers and technicians, etc. They are also called as scientific terms, academic terminologies or professional terms, and often subdivided into literary terms, legal terminology, medical terminology and so on. In the Standard Korean Dictionary, technical terms are classified into a total of 48 subdivisions excluding proper nouns.
However, the fact is that in Korea even people in a same profession show a wide gap in their understanding of the term, often causing confusions and misunderstanding in the course of communication. This confusion often causes more grievous results particularly in translation of terms in a foreign language into Korean. It has even been pointed out as something representing inferiority of Korean culture and tradition. From practical point of view, the lack of unified use of the terms has been led to a huge waste of national resources, for example, in international trades as well as communication between individuals and groups.
In this context, we believe that right understanding of these technical terms and creating measures to use them productively will be a key resource for the further expansion of knowledge and industrial development which we need in the information era. That is why many countries across the world began to use their resources to work on it, trying to establish an efficient management system not only for the existing technical terms but also those pouring in to our society day in, day out. In Korea, too, the government launched a project in association with academic institutions for standardized translation and use of technical terms. Planned as part of the 21st Sejong Project, it is expected to make a great contribution to this country's efforts to prepare for the era of globalization and to further international cultural and industrial exchanges.
To make successful results from this project for standardization of technical terms, we should be able to achieve a high standard of knowledge in computer science as well as linguistics. For this, we need, first of all, to collect technical terms along with examples of their use, and produces standardized lists of terms verified by experts in various scientific field including the Korean language. Creating a very effective scientific tool for management of technical terms is essential for efficient exchange of information, which is also a key factor to establish a successful information society. Working out the lists of technical terms that correspond with their counterparts in a foreign language and constructing a multilingual dictionary of technical terms are two of the project's main objectives. Details of the R&D activities to achieve the objectives are as follows.
....(1) Construction of the corpus of technical terms by collecting terms from dictionaries,
.........surveys and other sources
....(2) Studies of language engineering for the integrated information database of multilingual
.........technical terminology
....(3) Academic discussions and proposals on the standardization of technical terminology
....(4) Organization of research teams in association with international organizations interested in
.........the subject
....(5) Collection and compilation of the dictionaries of technical terms to provide bilingual information
....(6) Collection of information on the latest R&D activities by international organizations
.........and establishment of cooperative relationship with them by participating in the international
.........efforts for standardization of technical terms
....(7) Education and training of researchers by organizing national and international conferences
....(8) Education and publicity to raise public interest in the project through newsletters and
.........homepage of the Korea Terminology Research Center for Language and Knowledge
.........Engineering.
........
This project is planned to be carried out in an organic combination of the activities above.
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