GATE: an Italian-English glossary of the language of academic administrations

The European Union’s policy of multilingualism and intra-EU mobility, which is also reflected at the academic level in such exchange programs as Erasmus+ and Horizon2020, and excellence awards such as the HR Excellence in Research Award, has resulted in the need for a number of academic institutions to make their administrative documents accessible to international audiences. This has been accomplished mostly by translating all relevant texts, which include official charters, codes, regulations, calls, contracts, forms and web pages, to name but a few, into English, the de facto lingua franca of academia. However, since the documents produced by Italian academic administrations, not unlike those written by the public administration, are characterized by high levels of complexity, especially at the lexical level, translation into English may become a burdensome task. The present paper reports on the construction and describes the main features of an Italian-English glossary of the most salient technical terms and phrasal expressions typical of academic-administrative language (GATE, i.e. Glossary of Academic-administrative Terms and Expressions) which was developed at the University of Insubria with the aim of providing a partial solution to this problem. The glossary wordlist was compiled making use of corpus linguistic methods from a corpus of 63 documents (and their English translations) produced by the academic administration and covering a wide variety of academic-administrative genres. Although developed specifically for a particular academic institution, the glossary, which provides a translation for a total of 508 entries among single-word and multi-word items that are characteristic of supra-local academic-administrative language, may be a useful resource for all Italian research institutions aiming at internationalizing their documents and aligning their policies to EU standards.