Following on from yesterday’s post on new terms and new fields, you may be interested in the following international conference: “Terminology: Domain Loss and Gain” to be held from 20-21 April 2023 at KU Leuven Brussels Campus. It is being co-organised by NL-Term, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, European Association for Terminology, and Infoterm, with the participation of the Translation Service of the Council of the European Union.

“Worries about the influence of dominant languages on local languages, in particular in professional contexts, continue to exist, as do worries about the threat of (digital or other) extinction of minority languages. Conversely, there are many attempts, successful as well as unsuccessful, at enriching languages with language-specific terms for new concepts. The conference aims to address all these issues and welcomes theoretical work as well as practical examples.”

“The concept of domain loss originated in the Nordic countries in the 1990s and was defined by Laurén, Myking & Picht as “Loss of ability to communicate in the national language at all levels of an area of knowledge because of deficient further development of the necessary means of professional communication”. Foremost among those ‘necessary means’ are the terms needed to communicate on specific professional topics in one’s own language.

The term domain loss caught on quickly and became a buzzword shared by journalists and picked up by national language commissions. Extending their theory, Laurén, Myking & Picht also coined the terms domain conquest and domain reconquest, to refer to examples where a national language comes up with its own means of communication in a particular domain or supplies those means where they were at first lacking.”

For information on pre-registration, key dates, the call for papers and more, see the conference website.