Empowering Communication Amidst Disaster: A Multilingual Termbase Initiative
TermQuake is a multilingual termbase project launched in the aftermath of the massive Türkiye-Syria earthquakes that took place on February 6, 2023. Initiated by three undergraduate students from the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies of Boğaziçi University, the project has grown exponentially with the help of professors from the same department and the contribution of around a hundred volunteers and professional interpreters. TermQuake evolved rapidly into a termbase of 30 languages, with the specifically classified domains built around real-time disaster management phases, namely search and rescue, first aid, and disaster management. With the help of an IT team, the termbase is turned into an application that can work offline and can be used by volunteers in the field.
This presentation aims to illustrate the conditions leading to the creation and the development of the termbase, the terminology problems encountered along the way, and how they are solved while conveying the nature of the past and possible future use cases, particularly by interpreters. Such cases target earthquake zones where the termbase aims to enable communication between international relief teams and local aid teams.
Betül Mulbay is one of the three students who initiated TermQuake, along with Abdullah Sadık Kuralay and Ahmet Ergün. From the term selection process to managing the large group of contributors, she played a significant role in advancing the project alongside her teammates and professors. She is currently in her senior year at Boğaziçi University’s Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies. She is learning Spanish, Korean, and Arabic. Her interests also include Turkish sign language, digital content creation, and conference interpreting.
Abdullah Sadık Kuralay Abdullah Sadık Kuralay is a senior student in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Boğaziçi University and he is one of the three undergraduate students behind TermQuake, along with Betül Mulbay and Ahmet Ergün. His focus for the project’s progress was on problem identification, voluntary recruitment, and database optimization. For his graduation thesis, he carried out an experimental study with native speakers of Turkish and Spanish, on communication strategies and receptive multilingualism. His areas of interest include applied and computational linguistics, second language acquisition, localization, visualization, and content creation.
Ahmet Ergün Ahmet Ergün is a senior undergraduate student at Boğaziçi University double majoring in Western Languages and Literatures & Translation Studies. He joined the TermQuake project on 9 February 2023 and has since worked as a co-coordinator and a terminologist. His academic and professional interests include literature and medicine, medical translation, corpus-assisted discourse studies, and terminology management