ARCHIVÉE Canadian Terminology Standards in Information Technology

 

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Silvia Pavel*

REFERENCE: Pavel, S., "Canadian Terminology Standards in Information Technology", Standardizing Terminology for Better Communication: Practice, Applied Theory, and Results, ASTM STP 1166, R. A. Strehlow and S. E. Wright, Eds., American Society for Testing and Materials, Philadelphia, 1993, pp. 30-37.

ABSTRACT: National and international terminology standards play an important role in improving communication among special language users and in enhancing knowledge transfer to the layperson. This paper gives an overview of Canadian practice and results in standardizing bilingual terminologies in a rapidly growing field, and of the ongoing efforts being made to achieve conceptual structuring and usage harmonization. It emphasizes the relevance of the user-oriented approach for the preparation of national standards and the usefulness, for various standard organizations, of coordinating work methods and sharing theoretical insights.

KEY WORDS: special language communication, terminology updating, conceptual organization, usage harmonization, bilingual standardization

Technical vs Terminological Standards

Industrial standards stipulate the general requirements and the technical specifications that goods and services must meet and that must be uniformly applied by manufacturers, users, governmental institutions, or other organizations in order for these goods to be lawfully circulated on the consumer market. As such, they play a vital role in the coherent development of any industry.

Although precise and sometimes lengthy and highly formalized, industrial standards do not necessarily define concepts by means of properties and relations pertinent to a homogeneous body of specialized knowledge so that it becomes accessible outside the industry. Industrial/technical standards are not concerned with special language structure. They certainly do not acquaint the general public with a preferred linguistic usage and are not designed for educational or communicative purposes.

Terminology standards, on the other hand, do indeed primarily serve such educational and communicative purposes. They are usually prepared by practitioners and theoreticians in a given field, with the help of language and documentation specialists, in order to facilitate the linguistic transfer of specialized knowledge among all members of a professional community from cognoscenti to novices, between all professional communities sharing an interest in that body of knowledge and, beyond them, to language mediators and the general public.

Terminology standards clearly and concisely define interrelated concepts by means of distinctive properties and semantic relations and indicate preferred terms as well as permitted and deprecated usage.

Technical and terminological standards are mutually relevant. Since research and knowledge transfer normally precede mass production in technical fields, emerging technologies are sometimes provided first with terminology standards and only later with technical ones. Whatever their chronological order, the two sets of standards can usefully complement each other [1].

Moreover, technical and terminological standards both need to be periodically updated. Terminology standards must integrate new concept definitions and designations, reselect the distinctive features of evolving concepts, and deal with obsolete designations and the ensuing reordering of permitted terms.

National and International Terminology Standards

Since the turn of the century, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and ISO have asserted themselves as the main international bodies in technical and terminological standardization. After the Second World War, an ever-increasing number of national bodies have joined their technical committees (TC) or subcommittees (SC) and contributed to the preparation of international standards or to the creation of national standards based on international ones. Some subcommittees have also concerned themselves with the preparation of terminology standards [2].

Today, the standardization of national and international terminologies is not only more comprehensive, in keeping with technological developments, but is also better coordinated. Thus, when national standards are created for fields in which ISO has not yet produced a standardized terminology, they are developed with a future international standard in mind. Once adopted by ISO, the international terms and definitions are in turn considered by national committees and may eventually be included in their updated standards. The result is always improved communication and enhanced intellectual, scientific, and technical cooperation.

The coordination of work methods for the preparation of such standards is ensured through consistent application of regularly updated ISO guidelines such as:

1. ISO-704—Principles and Methods of Terminology
2. ISO-639—Representation of Names of Languages
3. ISO-31—General Principles Concerning Quantities, Units, and Symbols
4. ISO-1951—Lexicographical Symbols for Use in Vocabularies
5. ISO-860—International Harmonization of Concepts and Terms
6. ISO-1087—Vocabulary of Terminology
7. ISO-3166—Representation of Names of Countries
8. ISO-7154—Documentation. Bibliographic filing principles

ISO/IEC cooperation also has improved over the years: ISO issues technical standards in all fields with the exception of electrical and engineering standards, which are IEC’s responsibility. For instance, the ISO and IEC Councils created a Joint Technical Committee (JTC I) for the standardization of information technology. The first of its various subcommittees, i.e., SC 1, is responsible for terminology standards. The Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) holds the secretariat of this subcommittee; the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) has the chair.

The Canadian Committee for Standards in Information Technology

For the last 15 years, the Canadian Committee (CC) of JTC 1-SC 1 dealing with the terminology of information technology (IT) has played a very active role in the preparation and updating of approximately 30 ISO standards in this rapidly evolving field. Each new standard is normally studied by all national committees and voted upon in four stages, i.e., working document, committee draft, draft international standard, and international standard. Updating and revision of ISO standards in information technology is carried out at five-year intervals.

The committee holds monthly meetings where each member presents comments on terms and definitions under discussion based on extensive research of specialized literature, personal knowledge, and work experience. Discussions on the semantic network of each standard and the definition of individual concepts are consensus oriented and aim to produce a unified set of comments and modifications, which are submitted to the SC 1 Secretariat in Paris along with a ballot.

Canadian voting on draft international standards depends on whether those standards are in conformity with standards used in Canada, whether they are relevant for present and future use in Canada, or whether there is a potential for future harmonization through modification of either set of standards. The Canadian Committee may abstain from voting when the subject of a draft has no present or future relevance for Canada and/or when the Committee has not participated in its development.

The committee’s membership consists of specialists from the public and private sectors, university professors, and language specialists in both French and English, from the federal government (TERMIUM bank), the Canadian Standards Association, and Quebec’s Office de la langue française (BTQ bank). Representatives from the Department of the Secretary of State hold the chair, provide most of the logistic support, and do all secretarial work.

The active role played by the Secretary of State in this national committee stems from its mandate to unify and standardize the specialized terminologies used by the federal Public Service in both official languages. Under this mandate, a governmental committee was empowered in the late 1970s to produce an official bilingual vocabulary of data processing based on relevant ISO standards and catering to the particular needs of various federal departments in this field [3].

The official vocabulary was last reprinted in 1984. At the same time, the American National Standards Committee in Information Processing Systems published its first edition of a monolingual American National Dictionary for Information Processing Systems. Although this bilingual vocabulary sold out rapidly, its contents are still being updated and disseminated through the federal terminology bank, TERMIUM. It is worth noting that TERMIUM contains more than one million bilingual entries in 24 fields of specialized knowledge, that it is regularly updated by 60 terminologists at a weekly rate of about 3000 transactions, and that its computer science section alone has more than 44 000 entries.

Canadian Standards for Information Technology

Communication Needs and Target Group Analysis

In June 1989, the Canadian committee of ISO-SC 1 acknowledged that the officiai vocabulary of data processing, long out of print, was also out of date. Concepts had evolved; certain official terms were by now obsolete; new terms and definitions had been added to the ISO standards and to the TERMIUM bank. Much of this valuable terminological information was not being disseminated in information technology circles. Incompatible definitions were found in the official vocabulary, some ISO drafts, and the IEC International Technical Vocabulary 191.

Furthermore, the updated ISO standards in information technology only partially reflected Canadian usage of both English and French terminologies. The Canadian public was unaware of proper Canadian usage. Quebec’s standardization organization had not issued any terminology standards in this field, and the only standardized French terminology then available on the market was published by AFNOR, whose usage quite understandably was either international or specific to France. Given the omnipresence of information technology in Canadian society, national terminology standards were urgently needed. The Canadian committee also knew that special care would have to be taken for the proper dissemination of such standards in educational institutions, the mass media, and the public and private sectors. These considerations squarely placed the Committee’s task in the realm of socioterminology [4], a user-oriented approach according to which terminology research is based on actual usage among specialists and on a thorough analysis of terminology needs in target groups.

Working Procedure

Under the aegis of the Standards Council of Canada, the national committee drafted a two-year plan for the preparation of a bilingual IT terminology standard to be published by the Canadian Standards Association. The plan was implemented in six stages:

Stage 1 — Collection of over 2000 bilingual entries in the following ISO-delimited subfields:

fundamental terms**

arithmetic and logic operations

equipment technology**

organization of data**

representation of data**

preparation and handling of data**

computer programming**

control, integrity, and security

data communication

operating techniques and facilities**

processing units**

peripheral equipment

computer graphics

reliability, maintainability and availability

programming languages

information theory

databases*

distributed data processing

system development

interfaces between process computer systems and technical processes

calculators

text processing*

computer-integrated manufacturing*

local area networks*

OSI architecture*

office automation*

artificial intelligence and expert systems*

Although most of the terms collected by the national committee came from already published standards, many were selected from updated to-be-published editions (**), or from Canadian contributions to yet-unpublished, new ISO standards (*). Others were extracted from updates to the federal government’s official vocabulary and to its terminology bank. These updates were documented with references from field specialists, IT encyclopedias, dictionaries, monographs, and periodicals. Committee members already acquainted through various readings [5] with current trends in information technology, also carried out individual research on a number of new concepts in their areas of expertise. These were studied by the national committee at its monthly meetings and eventually added to the collection.

ISO standards provided the Committee with ready-made conceptual systems in all subfields, with the notable exception of artificial intelligence (AI), the concept organization of which had been studied by terminologists in Canada and in France [6].

These conceptual frameworks were, however, reviewed in the light of recent theoretical insights [7] when the Committee met in order to decide what concepts to retain, add, or drop from the draft version of the national standard. Topmost and “father„ concepts were retained together with their second- and third-level “children„ based on their practical interest, the pertinence of their evolution, and the usefulness of their definition in a given subfield.

The scope and weight of recent technological developments was the main criterion for inserting new concepts into preexisting structures. Many such additions were made in the subfields of computer graphics (new modeling techniques), office automation (new display functions, text editors), robotics, and computer-integrated manufacturing.

After careful analysis, some very recent concepts were not included either because of their marked fuzziness or because of marked contradictions in available definitions. The Committee also felt that it was too early to standardize tentative French terms designating as yet little known, albeit highly advanced, technologies. For instance, subordinated concepts related to expert systems and to intelligent tutoring systems were kept out of the first edition of the national standards. Instead, they have since been stored in a terminological repository; their evolution is being closely observed [8], and they will very likely be reconsidered for inclusion in the next edition.

On the whole, changes to conceptual structures emphasized compatibilities across language barriers, as well as relations between concepts in each subfield and across closely related subfields, in accordance with the guidelines of ISO-860 International Harmonization of Concepts and Terms.

Stage 2 — A simple strategy was devised for determining what terms constituted Canadian as opposed to international usage. This consisted in comparing ISO standards to terms indexed in recent Canadian, American, and European IT literature, evaluating their frequency, and contrasting synonyms in source manuals and proceedings of national and international IT symposia.

While looking for terms in international proceedings, the needs for usage harmonization and terminology dissemination became quite obvious: related topics were presented at the same session, in the same language, and by means of parallel tentative terminologies. When other languages were used, the variations were even greater. Once again, the TERMIUM and BTQ Banks contributed to achieving the stated objective of harmonizing usage by facilitating the finding and selection of the most frequent and self-explanatory terms.

Finally, an ad-hoc group of Canadian experts (researchers, university professors, and practitioners in the public and private sectors) reviewed and commented on the terms, their status with respect to established Canadian usage and available definitions.

Stage 3 — The committee then split up into four working groups. Each group became responsible for the preparation of standards in seven connected subfields based on terminologies reviewed by the ad-hoc group. All groups followed the same layout guidelines:

1. Order of terms within entries. In both languages, terms preferred in Canada came first, followed by international ones. For example, the "laptop computer" is called "ordinateur portatif" in French-speaking countries, but in Canada the synonym "ordinateur mallette" is preferred over the international term. Also, the "internal label" recorded on a data medium is called "étiquette interne" in Canada and "label interne" in France and in ISO standards. Considering the large number of selected entries, such geographical differences were remarkably rare in English and slightly more frequent in French.

   Deprecated terms came last and were marked as such. For example, the English and French standardized terms "irrecoverable error" and "erreur irrémédiable" were followed by their deprecated synonyms "unrecoverable error" and "erreur non redressable." A note explained their incorrectness.

   Obsolete designations, less-known synonyms, and undocumented acronyms were eliminated, and well–documented ones were added. For instance, "piggybacking"—a fraudulent type of access to data files—did sot have an established French equivalent at the beginning of the 1980s. The English term was commonly used in French. In order to replace it, the Government Standards Committee had recommended the French term "accès en resquille" in its official vocabulary. Although the recommended term was stillborn, the borrowed term has nonetheless been spontaneously replaced in current usage by such expressive designations as "accès superposé," "accès à califourchon," and even "tour à dada." These changes were consequently acknowledged in the Canadian standard. Likewise, "historique d’expertise," an obsolete French equivalent of "audit trail," was replaced with "vérification rétrospective."

   Metaphorical synonyms were added as permitted or even preferred terms whenever warranted by actual usage. For example, the synonym "deadly embrace" was added to the main term "deadlock" because of its widespread Canadian (and, for that matter, North American) usage.

2. Writing of definitions. The Committee opted for brevity and clarity, consistently using terms defined elsewhere in the same standard and a limited general vocabulary. The definitions emphasized distinctive characteristics and basic semantic relations in each subfield, such as:
   • inclusion
     • class
       • type/instance
     • meronymic
       • object/component
       • collection/member
       • mass/portion
       • object/material
       • area/place
   • contiguity
   • possession
   • attribution
   • cause/effect

   Once a definition had been drafted in either French or English, it was immediately translated into the other language and both versions were revised with respect to one another, with the end result that the definitions agreed upon were technically equivalent and structurally identical.

3. Notes. These were used sparingly to indicate language–specific features, exceptions, and to warn against possible confusions. For example, the term "worm" (a destructive routine that adulterates valid programs) was followed in both languages by a note explaining its worst effects.

   In English only, a second note warned against confusion with the acronym WORM (write-one-read-many-times). In the came subfield, that is, data protection and security, notes to the entries "virus", " logic bomb," and "Trojan horse" explained that a virus may contain a logic bomb and copy itself indefinitely into the host software, whereas logic bombs and Trojan horses do not recopy themselves.

4. Examples. These were meant to illustrate particular instances of complex conceptual classes and also term usage. Thus, the definition of access right was followed by instances of such a right: read, write, or delete a data file.

   Stage 4 — Differences in expert opinions, conflicting, or ambiguous data had to be discussed and decided upon in plenary meetings. Such was the case for all seemingly irreducible differences between the IEC vocabulary, specialized dictionaries, and ISO draft definitions for concepts related to maintainability and reliability of hardware and software.

   Stage 5 — The entries prepared in each working group were word-processed and alphabetically ordered for fast and user-friendly access. A subfield indication preceded selected definitions so that the underlying conceptual structure could be tracked. The manuscript was then provided with French and English indexes and proofread.

   Stage 6 — The recently published Canadian terminology standards in information technology have bien provided with a reader feedback mechanism, which allows for comments to be sent to the Canadian Standards Association where they will be studied in preparation of the next edition.

   Aware of future trends and new standards needs in information technology [9], the Canadian Committee of ISO JTC 1-SC 1 is already studying new developments in artificial intelligence applications that will radically transform the processing of information. New collections of French and English terms are presently being compiled in the promising research areas of natural language processing, machine translation, speech/image understanding and synthesis, and in massively parallel processing. This will not only facilitate updating the current national standards in the field of information technology, but will also entail an increased Canadian contribution to the preparation of new ISO standards.

References

[1] Galinski, C. and Nedobity, W., "Special Languages, Terminology Planning and Standardization", Standardization of Technical Terminology. Principles and Practices, 2^nd vol., R. Strehlow, Ed., ASTM, Philadelphia. 1988, p. 7.

[2] ISO memento, 1990, p. 3; Favre, C. J., "International Standardization Work in Terms and Terminology", Terminologie et traduction, N^o 1, 1990, European Community Commission, Luxembourg.

[3] Information Technology Vocabulary / Vocabulaire de la technologie de l’information, Government EDP Standards Committee / Comité des normes gouvernementales en informatique, Department of Supply and Services / MAS, Canada, 1981.

[4] Approach discussed by Guespin, L. and Laroussi, F. in "Glottopolitique et standardisation terminologique", Banque des mots, special issue 1989, INaLF-CNRS-CILF, Paris; Humbley, J., "Terminologie et conscience linguistique", Banque des mots, special issue 1989, INaLF-CNRS-CILF, Paris; Gaudin, F., "Socioterminology and Expert Discourses", TKE '90: Terminology and Knowledge Engineering, H. Czap and W. Nedobity, Eds., Indeks Verlag, Frankfurt/M., 1990; Rousseau, L.-J., "La pratique québécoise de la normalisation terminologique", Meta, Vol. 36, N^o 1, 1991; Gambier, Y., "Travail et vocabulaire spécialisés: prolégomènes à une socio-terminologie", Meta. Vol. 36, N^o 1, 1991, Montreal.

[5]Present trends in information technology were outlined in The Information Technology Revolution, T. Forrester, Ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1985; The Future of Information Technology, S. Andriole, Ed., Petrocelly Books, Princeton, NJ, 1985; Information Systems in the 80’s, U. Weil, Ed., Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982.

[6]Pavel, S., Intelligence logicielle. Dictionnaire français-anglais, Secrétariat d’État du Canada, 1989; Otman, G., "Terminologie et intelligence artificielle", Banque des mots, special issue, INaLF-CNRS-CILF, 1989, Paris.

[7]Sowa, J., Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA, 1984.

[8]Cormier, M. and Rioux, L. P., "Procédés de formation et matrices terminogéniques en terminologie des systèmes experts", Meta, Vol. 36, N^o 1, 1991, Montreal.

[9]"A Vision for the Future. Standards Needs for Emerging Technologies", ISO-IEC, 1990; Looking Ahead. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the American Translators Association, A. E. Wilson, Ed., New Orleans, LA, 1990.

* Chief of the Montreal-Quebec Division, Terminology and Linguistic Services Directorate, Official Languages and Translation, Secretary of State-Canada, 200 René-Lévesque West, West Tower, Room 401, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2Z 1X4.