Preface

Terminology is a fascinating interdisciplinary field of interest. A major part of the work of technical writers and translators is to deal with terminology, but there are other users of terminology as well. Basic to all work with terminology is the concept underlying the individual terms.

Terminology is presented in different ways, today most commonly with the help of computer based Terminology Management Systems. In the process of setting up a termbase a framework has to be defined that enables structured collection of relevant information on terminology. To avoid double work an interchange format has been defined, based on SGML. This format enables terminology-interchange from one Terminology Management System to another. This Hausarbeit vorgelegt im Rahmen der Ersten Staatsprüfung für das Lehramt für die Sekundarstufe II, by its length and requirements sort of comparable to a Master's thesis, deals with terminology for spoken language systems.

The first chapter explains both of the fields that are taken into account, terminology and spoken language systems, and takes a closer look on terminology-science. The second chapter presents the principles of organising, structuring and formating termbases, also explaining the use of Terminology Management Systems. After some practical examples of existing Terminology Management Systems a terminology interchange format is presented with an example of problems occurring in the conversion process from one Terminology Management System into the interchange format.

The appendix holds the DTD of the terminology interchange format, a printout of an excerpt of a sample termbase, the (UNIX shell-) scripts that were used to convert the termbase into the interchange format and at last the excerpt sample termbase in the interchange format.

The full sample termbase (in ASCII and MARTIF format), this thesis in Postscript-, HTML- and Portable-Data-Format (Adobe Acrobat format), as well as the excerpt sample termbase in ASCII and MARTIF format are included on CD-ROM.

Thorsten Trippel
Fri May 21 13:04:11 MET DST 1999