2009 Multi-lingualism & Multi-culturalism Annual Report

ADHO Standing Committee on Multi-Lingualism & Multi-Culturalism (SCM)

Report on activities and matters arising

June 2008 - June 2009

Elisabeth Burr

Standing Committee on Multi-lingualism & Multi-culturalism

1) Meeting of the ADHO Steering Committee

At the meeting of the ADHO Steering Committee Mon 23 June & Wed 25 June 2008 at the University of Oulu, Finland it was decided that the Standing Committee on Multi-Lingualism & Multi-Culturalism (SCM) would be composed as follows:

  • Elisabeth Burr (chair)
  • Espen Ore (ALLC representative)
  • Natasha Smith (ACH)
  • Stefan Sinclair (SDH-SEMI)
  • Jan Christoph Meister, ex-officio member, internationalization editor of DH

2) Meeting of the Standing Committee

At the meeting of the Standing Committee on 27.06.2008 we identified a three-tier  plan of action for our committee:

Phase 1: Concrete actions towards multilingualism, including

  • a mechanism and policy for the translation of the TOCs of LLC and DHQ, involving ADHO constituent members
  • dto. for multilingual CFPs and abstracts

Phase 2: Policy initiatives, including

  • hosting of DHQ conferences in  countries other than the US and Europe
  • coopting new members from e.g. Japan onto our committee

Phase 3: Research projects, including

  • software for generating multi-lingual concept ontologies from papers and abstracts

Topics & actions discussed

3) Practical activities

  1. Call 2009
    1. not all 2008 versions could be updated (cf. Hungarian, Italian), German is still missing, Norwegian has not been finished yet
    2. DH 2009: The Call is available in:
      1. English
      2. French
      3. Polish
      4. Russian
      5. Serbian
      6. Spanish
      7. Swedish
    3. The Call was sent out to members of ALLC and ACH asking for volunteer translations. The result of this was quite poor. Only 2 people reacted:
      Spanish Esteva  María
      Serbian Sukovic Suzana
    4. The Call was not sent to SDH-SEMI as had been planned
    5. A long and intensive mail conversation with a Japanese Scholar led to her becoming a member of one of the associations.The plan to do a Japanese translation had to be given up, however.
  2. Contribution to ConfTool wording French - Spanish - German

4) “Research into the linguistic and cultural nature of the ADHO community”

see separate attachment

5) Co-options

The committee has decided to c-opt Jan Rybicki for one year. He will be a memberof the committee from the 25th of June 2009 onwards.