Members of the forum who do not find an answer in our database have also the possibility of sending the question to the list where any member is invited to reply.

If you send a message to the mailing list address, all members will receive it. If you reply to one of these messages, you have the possibility of answering only to the sender or to the whole mailing list whenever you think it will be interesting for everybody.

If you would like to participate in this forum, please send us an e-mail to strait@itu.int presenting yourself and explaining your motivation.

Newsletter No. 3 July 2008
Newsletter No. 2 October 2007
Newsletter No. 1 January 2007

What happened since last Newsletter (October 2007)

As the access to Termite 6L does not requires password anymore, we cannot know how many of you have queried the system recently. We know however that some 2901 sessions have been established (47.2 % from inside ITU), each one comprising one or more queries. Excluding sessions from people in charge of updating the database, your preferred language pairs were 19.5% English into Arabic, 12.6 % English into Spanish, 12.5 % English into French and 11.3 % French into English. Your preferred language was English: 54.5 % as source and 25.8 % as target.

Since December 2007, we have been keeping track of queries yielding no results as well as of displayed entries. Excluding traces from people in charge of updating the database, an analysis of these logs shows interesting results:

1. Many unsuccessful searches are due to misspelling or to wrong selection of option Abbrev/Term or language pair. We are adding an automatic search (to be triggered when no result is found) without taking into account the option Abbrev/Term; a warning message will indicate if a very short expression (less than 6 characters) is looked for as a term or the opposite, if a rather long expression (more than 6 characters) is looked for as an abbreviation. For misspellings, we are testing an automatic suggestion mechanism to be triggered when no result is found. These additional automatic searches (a total of three) will delay a little bit the response but only when no results are found.
2. Thanks to the most frequently failed queries trace (182 terms or abbreviations queried 686 times), it was possible for instance to add abbreviations CIIP and MAAWG to existing terms critical information infrastructure protection and Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, respectively. We will add some more entries or elements as a result of this analysis.
3. The three most frequently displayed entries were Internet Engineering Task Force (ETF), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and code-division multiple access (CDMA). The latter three entries have all six languages, but some others, such as weighted round robin (WRR), phase shift keying (PSK) or time division multiple access (TDMA), do not have all and are therefore to be completed.
4. We have also noticed that most of the abbreviations in Termite are less than 6-character in length and have a single component (no space, only letters). Less than 6% of the terms consist of a single word, but only 36% of them are defined. One of our goals will be therefore to find a definition for those single-word terms such as for instance, absorptance, babyphone or cablecaster.

The forum has been very quiet either because probably you have found all the answers in the database or you forgot its existence. In fact there have been only the following issues:

1. A discussion about the best French translation for hubbing and
2. A discussion about the best Spanish and French translations for acknowledged/unacknowledged alarm

If you need a reminder on instructions for using the forum, please send an e-mail to Mailserv@itu.int with the command intro conf-trad-ext in the body of the message. (Commands in the subject line are NOT processed.)

Termite has been updated continuously. The ongoing cleanup operation after the merger of the old Termite and ACRoTermite databases is going on. The consolidated database contains by end of June 2008 about 71 500 entries having in all 99 969 English terms and abbreviations, 71 727 in French, 66 138 in Spanish, 17 698 in Arabic, 15 261 in Chinese and 14 838 in Russian.

In addition to the duplicates cleanup, Termite has been updated and completed regularly with, since the beginning of 2008, 1655 new entries and 7650 modified or deleted entries. The main sources since last newsletter are coming from:

- Arabic, Chinese and Russian terms missing in entries having already five or four languages.
- Budget-related terminology in Russian.
- Collection of the basic texts of the ITU adopted by the Plenipotentiary Conference, Edition 2007 (as part of a terminology trial in order to evaluate resources needed to complete the ACR missing terms)
- ITU-R, Recs. BT-601-6 (2007), F.1399-1 (2001), F.592-4 (2007), V.430-3 (1990), V.431-7 (2000), V.461-5 (1993), V.574-4 (2000)
- ITU-T Recs. E.408 (2004), E.409 (2004), G.671 (2002), G.808.1 (2006), G.959.1 (2008), G.992.3 (2005), H.225.0 (2006), H.324 92005), J.172 (2005), J.173 (2005), M.1401 (2006), M.2100 (2003), O.172 (2005), T.30 (2005), T.810 (2006), V.250 (2003), X.144 (2003), Y.1731 (2006)
- Selection of terms common to Termite and the ITU-R & T database but having only EFS (as part of a terminology trial in order to evaluate resources needed to complete the ACR missing terms)
- United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (UNJSPF) terminology
- МСЭ-R, Правил а Процедуры, 2005
- МСЭ-R,  Рек.   BT.601-6 (2007),
- МСЭ-Т,  ВАСЭ-04, Желтая книга
- Отчет  ПСК  к ВКР-07
- الاتحاد  الدولي  للاتصالات،  معجم  مصطلحات  الاتصالات،   1987
- الاتحاد   الدولي  للاتصالات،  مكتب  الاتصالات  الراديوية،  القواعد  الإجرائية،   2005
- 国际电联CPM报告2007 as well as
- Contributions from the ITU translation sections.

Increasing the number of terms in Arabic, Chinese and Russian

As from 1 January 2005 as a result of implementing Resolution 115 (Marrakesh, 2002), the ITU has been carrying out its work in the six official languages of the Union on an equal footing.

However, the full switchover to six languages required a transition period. Among the objectives set out for this period in Resolution 154 (Antalya, 2006) on the use of the six official languages of the Union on an equal footing is the work related to terminology and in particular the Council is instructed to monitor the work carried out by the ITU secretariat on:

· paying special attention to completion of the integration of the terminology database for Arabic, Chinese and Russian and provide for the priority translation into Arabic, Chinese and Russian of terms and definitions;
· merging all existing databases for definitions and terminology into a centralized system, with proper measures for its maintenance, expansion and updating.

The TERMITE database consists of over 70 000 entries (English terms), with varying degrees of language spread (some 15% of entries are in 5 or 6 ITU official languages).

However, these 70 000 entries in fact fall into several different categories, ranging from treaty-text or official ITU-R & T terms, on the one hand, to general terminology not relating to telecommunications, monolingual English acronyms, linguistic difficulties specific to a particular language and other entries included in the database for general use primarily by translators, on the other.

Clearly, the category of terminology which is required by telecommunication experts and should thus be made available to the ITU constituency in all six languages is terminology specific to telecommunications and to ITU publications in particular. The other categories, which are a working tool for ITU translators, do not require such systematic six-language treatment.

Taking into account the proportion of terms in that category which already exist in the six languages, detailed analysis carried out by STRAIT shows that the volume of what may be categorized as ITU telecommunication terminology requiring priority translation into ACR comprises just under 30 000 terms..

If all 70 000 entries had 6 languages, the proportion of terms for each language would have to be about 16.7% out of a theoretical 420 000 total main terms. At present, the proportion is 32% E, 25% F, 24% S, 8% A, 6% C and 5% R out of a total of 222 500 real main terms. The goal of having at least 30 000 entries in 6 languages would yield the following proportions: 26% E, 21% F, 20% S, 11% A, 11% C and 11% R out of about a total of 270 500 main terms. A three-week trial has been completed with the help of the Arabic, Chinese and Russian translation sections in order to evaluate resources needed to complete the missing ACR terms.

Regarding the future ongoing maintenance and updating of the database in six languages once the 30 000 term backlog is absorbed, we shall switch to consistent six-language processing (extraction, validation and incorporation in the database) of terminology from ITU documentation henceforth drawn up in six languages.

If you have any question, suggestion or comment, please let us know.

New interface

A new TERMITE 6L interface is now available inside and outside ITU. For external users, in addition to all functions similar to the internal web interface (see below for details), the main modification is that, during a test period, there will be no need of personal username and password anymore. However, if the system performances deteriorate, the restricted access could be reestablished.

Until now the source language has to be different from the target language. In the new version, if you forget to set it so, instead of an error message, French will be automatically selected as target language when English is the source language; otherwise, English will be automatically selected as target language.

The title of the hit list will be Term or Abbreviation according to the option selected for the search.

The hit list will not be sorted alphabetically by default. However you can sort it manually by clicking on the title of each column. Clicking twice on the same column, the sorting will be either ascending or descending. This function may not work properly on some browsers, but we are trying to fix this problem.

Please note that if the hit list is longer than 200 lines, you can see the results beyond 200 by clicking on the arrow (>>>). In that case, manual sorting will apply only to the current page.

A check box named «Only» next to the target language allows you to include or not results without this target language.

By default, the search is always done with options «Starting with» and «Only» which is faster. However, if there is no result, an automatic search is launched immediately with options «Fuzzy» and «NOT Only».

When the «Starting with» option yields results, the hit list also contains terms and abbreviations available in the target language.

When looking for abbreviations, the hit list also contains the full term, i.e. the development of each abbreviation.

A check box named ITU-R/ITU-T official terminology is now available near the source language in order to allow you to launch at the same time a search in Termite 6L and in the Sancho database. Results coming from the latter will then be displayed in a new frame at the bottom of the window. In fact, we have imported into Termite all these data and display it in a more convenient and coherent way. A reliable synchronization mechanism is under development so that we can keep updated these new imported data according to the evolution of the ITU-R/ITU-T database.

The on-line help will be corrected accordingly.

What happened since last Newsletter (January 2007)

You are now 509 external registered users of our telecommunication terminology database. About 13% of you have queried the system at least once during the last 30 days, 28% have accessed it during the last 6 months and 60% have not connected to it during the last 12 months.

Some 8215 sessions have been established (63% from inside ITU), each one comprising one or more queries. Your preferred language pairs were 37% English into French, 27% English into Spanish, 16% English into Arabic, 3.5% French into English and 3% Spanish into English.

At present you are 309 subscribers to the forum. Your e-mail address domains are .Com(22%), .Int(19%), .Org(15%), .Fr(9%), .Ch(8%), .Ca(4%), .Es(4%), .Net(3%), .Ar(2%), .Mx(2%), .Cn(1%) and 10% others (.Be, .Bh, .Br, .By, .Cc, .Co, .Cz, .De, .Dz, .Ec, .Eg, .Eu, .Id, .Il, .It, .Kw, .No, .Pl, .Py, .Ru, .Uk, .Uy and .Gov).

The forum has been very quiet either because you have found all the answers in the database or you forgot its existence. In fact there have been only the following issues on this forum.

1. A discussion about the best Spanish translation for scattering radar
2. A discussion about the best English translation for collecte xDSL and
3. Some requests about the meaning of overhead, redundancy time, trick mode, spanning tree, wireline transmission, NACF and triple play.

Termite has been updated continuously. The ongoing cleanup operation after the merger of the old Termite and ACRoTermite databases is going on. The consolidated database contains about 69 372 entries having in all 97 582 English terms and abbreviations, 69 382 in French, 63 732 in Spanish, 16 865 in Arabic, 10 876 in Chinese and 11 245 in Russian. Almost 3% of the entries have all the 6 official languages, 45% have only EFS and 52% have other combinations. Data imported from the ITU-R/ITU-T database (but kept in separate tables) represent 23 247 additional entries, 94% of them having EFS only; 88% for ITU-T and 12% for ITU-R; most of these terms were already in Termite when previous versions of Sancho were imported.

In addition to the duplicates cleanup, Termite has been updated and completed regularly with, since the beginning of 2007, 1005 new entries and 3749 modified or deleted entries. The main telecommunications subdomains for new entries in 2007 are:

- ITU-T Recommendations from the series D, E, F and G
- COSPAS-SARSAT Glossary
- Symantec Glossary
- Plenipotentiary Conference 2006 Antalya
- WSIS Glossary
- CPM Report to WCR-07 as well as
- Contributions from the ITU Arabic, Chinese and Russian translation sections.

First of all we wish you a happy and successful new year!

You are now 464 external registered users of our telecommunication terminology database. About 15% of you have queried the system at least once during the last month, 38% have accessed it in the last 6 months and 11% have not connected to it during the last year.

Since July 1st when the new TERMITE 6L consultation interface was opened for external usage, there have been some 4700 sessions (63% from inside ITU), each one comprising one or more queries. Your preferred language pairs were 40% English into French, 27% English into Spanish, 11% English into Arabic, 3.5% French into English and 3% Spanish into English.

At present you are 292 subscribers to the forum. Your e-mail address domains are Com (23%), Int (18%), Org (15%), Fr (10%), Ch (9%), Ca (4%), Es (3%), Net (3%), Ar (2%), Mx (2%) and 11% others (Be, Bh, Br, By, Cc, Cn, Co, Cz, De, Ec, Eg, Eu, Id, Il, It, Kw, No, Py, Ru, Uk, Uy and Gov).

The forum has been very quiet either because you have found all the answers in the database, you forgot its existence or you were afraid to participate after the little crisis of September when several people were swamped by 10 messages related to the term asserting party. (Due to that crisis 85 people unsubscribed from the forum.)

In fact there have been only three issues on this forum.

1. A comment on the use of compartición in Spanish for the English term sharing (appearing in some 3400 ITU documents and publications or 300 000 web pages on Google, but not in dictionaries such as the Real Academia Española or the VOX).
2. A discussion about the best French translation for asserting party (leading to creation of entry GP2255 in Termite) and
3. A question on the translation into Arabic of penalty in expressions such as optical path penalty (leading to updating of entry number NA2873).

Termite has been updated continuously during 2006. The ongoing cleanup operation after the merger of the old Termite and ACRoTermite databases has resulted in deletion of some 1600 duplicated multilingual entries as well as some 32 000 duplicated E/F/S terms and abbreviations. The consolidated database contains about 68 700 entries having in all 97 000 English terms and abbreviations, 68 500 French, 63 000 Spanish, 15 400 Arabic, 10 600 Chinese and 10 600 Russian. Almost 3% of the entries have all the 6 official languages, 10% have 5, 13% have 4 and 47% have 3.

In addition to the duplicates cleanup, Termite has been updated and completed regularly with 2380 new entries and 3200 modified entries. The main telecommunications subdomains for new entries in 2006 were:

- ADSL transceivers
- Earthing and bonding
- Fibre and cables
- IP-based networks
- Optical transport networks (OTN)
- Security in Telecom
- Signal processing network equipment
- Submarine cable systems
- Telecommunications human-machine interfaces and
- Yellow book (telecommunication standardization, WTSA-04)