Resources and tools
The Dutch Language Institute (INT) hosts the Centre of Expertise for Dutch Terminology (Expertisecentrum Nederlandstalige Terminologie or ENT) that supports people and organisations involved with terminology. The ENT is the successor of the former Centre for Dutch Terminology (SNT). The ENT’s website contains both general, terminological information helping to implement terminological practice and a bibliographical list with professional literature for more in-depth knowledge. A section about tools has been included as well. A newsletter is distributed to subscribers several times a year, describing developments and events in the field of terminology.
The ENT further supports research through software development. The TermWerk platform provides researchers with a tool specifically designed for Dutch, integrating four main functions within a single workflow. For instance, the application can be used for corpus creation and corpus analysis using large amounts of digital text materials, automated term extraction, term management, and online publication and export. The integrated possibility to collaborate with several people within a single project is an additional example of how the ENT supports research.
Terminology work
The ENT is also focused on the development of terminological databases for a number of important domains and on strengthening and developing the terminology of the Dutch language. This concerns:
- government terminology (specifically terminology of higher education)
- health sector terminology
- legal terminology
- Dutch as a scientific language: mathematics, physics and chemistry.
The website of the ENT also permanently provides access to external contemporary terminology lists that are available online. These include monolingual Dutch terminology lists as well as multilingual lists that include Dutch. A section for historical terminology is being set up in line with the INT’s existing historical dictionaries and corpora.
A future point of focus for the ENT is to integrate terminological descriptions further into the central database of the Dutch vocabulary.
Further information and links:
- Centre of Expertise for Dutch Terminology
- Steurs, Frieda (2021) “Terminology at the Dutch Language Institute: Towards a Centre of Expertise for Professional Language”