Applied project
Project promotion: the Central Office for the Slovene Language of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region
Project management at the Slovene Research Institute (SLORI): Dr Matejka Grgič.
Collaborators: Andreja Kalc, Dr Damjan Popič, Aleksandra Velise, Dr Karin Marc Bratina, Kristina Pučnik, Dr Rajko Pirnat, Dr Luigi Varanelli, Dr Alenka Kocbek, Zvonka Marušič, David Bordon, Jasmin Franza
Project implementation period: 2018–2021
With the approval of the AAL/2311 Decree of 22 October 2018, the Central Directorate for Local Government, Security and Migration of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region granted SLORI extraordinary funding to provide technical support to the newly-established Central Office for the Slovene Language in carrying out its main institutional duties. Among these, it is worth mentioning the efforts to unify the translations of Italian laws and regulations into Slovene by creating a bilingual Italian-Slovene corpus, as well as a translation memory based on a terminology database and a glossary, following the example of EU institutions.
This terminology unification and revision project started in 2018. It consisted primarily in proofreading existing texts and creating a translation corpus that will serve as a basis for further work. These newly-created resources will be accessible via a dedicated web portal, thus making standardised terminology readily available for users. As part of the project, a working group and a terminology commission have been set up and are currently working on terminology standardisation. Moreover, collaboration has been established with some key institutions from the Republic of Slovenia, namely the University of Ljubljana and the Slovene Proofreaders’ Association. General and specific training courses aimed at translators and various officials working at the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region have also been held.
In 2018, a close technical cooperation was established between the Central Office for the Slovene Language at the Autonomous Region of FVG and SLORI, based on the unification of translations of Italian legal acts into Slovene, i.e. on the construction of Italian-Slovene parallel corpus, translation memory, termbase and glossary modelled on the translation tools used by the EU institutions.
To date, Central Office and SLORI have jointly reviewed over 2,000 pages of existing texts produced since 2005 in various public administration bodies in bilingual area of FVG. All texts were proofread, terminologically reviewed and edited. This resulted in a bilingual parallel Italian-Slovenian corpus, which was also transferred to the digital environment to be used by the SDL Trados CAT tool. The software, purchased by the Central Office and distributed free of charge to all municipal offices and other public administration bodies, allows translators to search and consult the database of existing translations in real time.
In addition to the translation memory, this material and new translations also resulted in the creation of a termbase accessible to all public administration bodies that have joined the network. It currently contains over 2,500 terms or Italian-Slovene terminological pairs: as soon as a translator comes across such a term in the original text, the program already suggests a suitable translation in the target language.
As the differences in the regulations of individual countries often make the translation of technical terminology in the field of law and public administration very demanding, the Central Office and SLORI have formed two working groups, one for administrative terminology and one for public finance and accounting in the public sector. The two groups are composed of experts from different professional fields whose task is to standardise more difficult terminological cases.
Since 2018, SLORI and the Central Office have also jointly implemented four training programmes for translators and other administrative staff from various public administration offices in the bilingual area.
In 2021, they launched the web portal Jezik na klik, which offers freely accessible Italian-Slovene communication tools and Slovene-language text creation and editing tools. The LORIS proofreader is a new SLORI application for automatic editing of Slovene-language texts, and is available on the portal free of charge from 15 February 2023.