Lexicography, Terminology, and Translation: Text-based Studies in Honour of Ingrid Meyer

Preface

ix This volume is intended to pay tribute to Ingrid Meyer, a valued colleague in the fields of lexicography, terminology, and translation. As a professor,1 Ingrid was unquestionably dedicated to her students and showed a great concern for student welfare. She played a pivotal role in the establishment and ongoing development of a computer lab for translation students in the days before computers were widespread and before the School of Translation and Interpretation had much in the way of a budget to cover such costs. She regularly identified promising students, encouraged them to go on to graduate school, and successfully sought out research grants, which she used primarily as a means of offering financial assistance and research experience to students. Outside the classroom, Ingrid made numerous contributions to the language community. Not only was she a certified translator fluent in English, French, and German, but she also became an avid student of Spanish. She was a valued member of the advisory board of the journal Terminology, and of the reading commi
ee of the translation journal Meta, as well as an active member in associations such as the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) and the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA). Her research activities are another indicator of the tremendous contribution that Ingrid made to the language community. As can be seen from the select bibliography of her works presented at the end of thisvolume,Ingridconductedresearchinthethreeinterrelateddomains of lexicography, terminology, and translation. Within these fields, one of her main interests was technology. Whether it was exploring the PREFACE LYNNE BOWKER x Lynne Bowker potential of electronic dictionaries and corpora or developing tools to represent terminological data or searching for ways to integrate computers into the translation process, much of her research was in some way situated at the intersection of language and computing. Following from her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Towards a New Type of General Bilingual Dictionary,” some of Ingrid’s earliest research was in the field of bilingual lexicography, with a particular focus on how dictionaries can be used as tools by both professional and student translators. Early in her career, Ingrid also integrated her role as a translation professor into her research, exploring issues such as selection examinations for student interpreters and the role and nature of computer studies and of specialized writing courses in a translation program. Undoubtedly, however, Ingrid will be best remembered for the significant contribution that she made to the field of terminology. One of her most notable achievements was her pioneering research into the development of terminological knowledge bases (TKBs). This work was largely carried out in collaboration with her husband and co-researcher Douglas Skuce, a professor of computer science. Together they made a formidable team as they introduced a new way of describing and representing terminological information, taking into account the oen complex and multidimensional networks of conceptual relations that exist within specialized fields of knowledge. Ingrid was also among the first researchers to recognize the value of corpus-based investigations into specialized language. Using specially designed collections of electronic text, which could be interrogated with the help of corpus analysis tools, Ingrid and her collaborators undertook a variety of terminological corpus-based studies. For example, in addition to conducting investigations into phraseology, concept analysis, and metaphor, Ingrid carried out highly original work in the area of de-terminologization—where terms that were once used only in specialized fields become taken up in general language—and in the semi-automatic identification of knowledge-rich contexts via lexical pa
erns. Whether acting in her capacity as a skilled language professional, a commi
ed teacher, an expert researcher, or a valued colleague, Ingrid wasanexcellentrolemodel.Herdedicationandoptimismshonethrough in all her undertakings, as can be witnessed from the following extract Preface xi from a le
er of holiday greetings that Ingrid sent to her co-workers at the School of Translation and Interpretation in December 2003: I would like to share with you one most unexpected thing about my cancer experience. Before all this happened, if someone had told me that I would get an incurable disease, be on medication indefinitely, and stop working full-time, I would have imagined that there couldn’t possibly be much of a life le. But things have turned out so differently. I’ve learned that the human spirit is incredibly adaptable and that there are bright sides...