Ten years of the GA-IATE terminology project

The Irish language gained official EU status in 2007. This status, despite coming with a significant derogation, saw a huge increase in the volume of legislation and other material to be translated to Irish by the EU institutions. Terminology was a problem: many technical domains that are central in EU legislation were relatively underdeveloped for Irish. In 2008 the Irish government, in collaboration with the EU institutions, established the GA-IATE project, to ensure Irish language terminology for translation requirements in the EU, through the mutilingual IATE termbase. Most Irish-language terminology support for the EU language units has been outsourced to Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge (FSG), a school in Dublin City University (DCU) with a long record of terminology research. The project workflow is managed through an infrastructure developed by FSG. It involves three levels of editorial research, online collaboration with EU translators and validation by the national terminology committee. Selection, extraction and subsequent import of IATE entries is overseen by the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). In 2012, FSG developed an extranet to facilitate interaction and discussion with EU translators in the Irish-language units of the various institutions. This allows translators to comment on draft terminology entries and register their views and suggestions, based on the terms recommended by FSG in the first instance. As the translators are stakeholders in the process, the extranet creates an online partnership of experts who willingly share their expertise to the benefit of the project. A total of around 90,000 IATE entries have been processed for Irish by the project team over the past ten years.