Termite Forum – Newsletter No. 1 – January 2007

First of all we wish you a happy and successful new year!

You are now 464 external registered users of our telecommunication terminology database. About 15% of you have queried the system at least once during the last month, 38% have accessed it in the last 6 months and 11% have not connected to it during the last year.

Since July 1^st when the new TERMITE 6L consultation interface was opened for external usage, there have been some 4700 sessions (63% from inside ITU), each one comprising one or more queries. Your preferred language pairs were 40% English into French, 27% English into Spanish, 11% English into Arabic, 3.5% French into English and 3% Spanish into English.

At present you are 292 subscribers to the forum. Your e-mail address domains are Com (23%), Int (18%), Org (15%), Fr (10%), Ch (9%), Ca (4%), Es (3%), Net (3%), Ar (2%), Mx (2%) and 11% others (Be, Bh, Br, By, Cc, Cn, Co, Cz, De, Ec, Eg, Eu, Id, Il, It, Kw, No, Py, Ru, Uk, Uy and Gov).

The forum has been very quiet either because you have found all the answers in the database, you forgot its existence or you were afraid to participate after the little crisis of September when several people were “swamped” by 10 messages related to the term asserting party. (Due to that crisis 85 people unsubscribed from the forum.)

In fact there have been only three issues on this forum.

1. A comment on the use of compartición in Spanish for the English term sharing (appearing in some 3400 ITU documents and publications or 300 000 web pages on Google, but not in dictionaries such as the Real Academia Española or the VOX).

2. A discussion about the best French translation for asserting party (leading to creation of entry GP2255 in Termite) and

3. A question on the translation into Arabic of penalty in expressions such as optical path penalty (leading to updating of entry number NA2873).

Termite has been updated continuously during 2006. The ongoing cleanup operation after the merger of the old Termite and ACRoTermite databases has resulted in deletion of some 1600 duplicated multilingual entries as well as some 32 000 duplicated E/F/S terms and abbreviations. The consolidated database contains about 68 700 entries having in all 97 000 English terms and abbreviations, 68 500 French, 63 000 Spanish, 15 400 Arabic, 10 600 Chinese and 10 600 Russian. Almost 3% of the entries have all the 6 official languages, 10% have 5, 13% have 4 and 47% have 3.

In addition to the duplicates cleanup, Termite has been updated and completed regularly with 2380 new entries and 3200 modified entries. The main telecommunications subdomains for new entries in 2006 were:

– ADSL transceivers

– Earthing and bonding

– Fibre and cables

– IP-based networks

– Optical transport networks (OTN)

– Security in Telecom

– Signal processing network equipment

– Submarine cable systems

– Telecommunications human-machine interfaces

– Yellow book (telecommunication standardization, WTSA-04)

Best regards,

Nelson Verástegui
Terminology, References and Computer Aids to Translation Section (STRAIT)
Conferences and Publications Department (C&P)
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Geneva, Switzerland
http://www.itu.int