JasonUnbound

Multilingual glossary

Despite being an unemployed librarian, I'm still on these two ALA committees. And their work goes on. I spent today working on a project for the ACRL Instruction Section committee I'm on. We're creating a multilingual glossary of library & information science terms, to be published online, for the benefit of international students, scholars, and other non-native English speaking library users.

I took on the Korean translations, and had a hell of a time of it, particularly for concepts like peer review and refereed journal, which my Korean experts say don't translate well, and for circulation terms like hold and recall, which don't necessarily exist in Korean libraries.

And even when there are clear translations, many native English speakers don't know what descriptors, limiters and Boolean operators are, so I'm not sure how much Korean translations of these terms are going to help. Fortunately, the glossary will also include clear yet pithy definitions in English. I think it's going to be pretty useful.