Dear all,
I think, the Canadian experience is very important and I would like to know
a bit more how bilingualism is treated at the moment of conferences.
For what concerns conferences I would like to ask you to have a look at
CLiP 2001 http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/CLiP2001/
and CLiP 2002 http://www.uclm.es/gcynt/clip2002/
Both conferences make available their web pages in about six different
languages
and ask people to hand in their abstracts in at least two languages. In
fact, at CLiP 2001
you find two language versions on the web.
What have we learnt by doing this?
1. The objective has to be pursued above all in the European context (but I
think
the respect for language diversity is not just a European business)
2. Most people are able to hand in abstracts in two different languages.
3. Making available web pages in several languages means a lot of work as
long as
individuals are trying to do this.
For what concerns multilingual electronic journals let me direct you to the
following
project:
And for what concerns multilingual projects I would like you to have a look at
http://www.uclm.es/gcynt/chime/
Some quite unordered thoughts on what we should aim at /on what we need to do.
We should at least aim at:
multilingual conference and electronic journal web-sites
abstracts of conference contributions in at least two languages to be
published on
the conference web
publications in journals with an abstract in a different language to be
decided by the
author her-/himself
publications in at least two languages in the electronic journal
What we need to do
change the idea that a paper should not be published in different languages
- it should
become important to publish in different languages, not in order to
increase the number
of one's publications but in order to help spread ideas and research
results (in linguistics,
for example, a lot what is published in English is never read by Germans or
people from
Romance countries, the same goes naturally for what is published in German
or in a Ro-
mance language). See also Espen on this and on what follows.
It would seem impossible, however, to have documents translated by members
of the lo-
cal orgs as Geoffrey proposed. Most of us are already struggling so much to
get through
their work that it is not possible to take on more, it would even be
counter productive.
It would be much better to get a university involved which is doing
translation studies
and would be willing to create or already has created a spin off enterprise
doing transla-
tions and thus could offer such a service to congress organisers and
speakers / authors
who cannot do their abstract or paper in a second language. We would
naturally have to
study ways to make such a service available in affordable terms. The
umbrella organisation
would have some responsibility there.
That's all for the moment, I have to prepare for the journey to Copenhague.
Best Elisabeth
HD Dr. Elisabeth Burr
Fakultät 2 / Romanistik
Gerhard-Mercator-Universität
Geibelstr. 41
47058 Duisburg
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/FB3/ROMANISTIK/PERSONAL/Burr/
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