Creation of a terminology data base for the Austrian Asylum Law

Irmgard Soukup-Unterweger, Tanja Wissik, Universities of Vienna and Graz

The Universities of Vienna (Centre for Translation Studies) and Graz (Department of Translation Studies) in cooperation with the Federal Asylum Office and with the support of UNHCR carried out a double-project "Creation of a terminology data base for the Austrian asylum law" and "Distribution of information material on asylum proceedings in Austria". The project was financially supported by the European Refugee Fund.

The project had two main aims. One of them was the creation of a terminology data base in the field of asylum and immigration law for professional interpreters and translators as well as for lay interpreters, who are being employed in proceedings in the first and second instance. Furthermore, information material provided by the Federal Asylum Office for new asylum applicants according to the Austrian asylum law was being evaluated regarding its comprehensibility from the perspective of the target group.

In this presentation the first part of the project, the terminology data base for the Austrian asylum law will be presented. As an introduction the Austrian asylum proceedings will be outlined. Moreover the terminological characteristics of the Austrian asylum terminology in contrast to the EU asylum terminology will be discussed. One motivation for the creation of the data base was the lack of monolingual or multilingual reference material in the area of asylum law. The other was the lack of knowledge about the asylum law terminology that had been criticized by the authorities. Therefore the data base can be regarded as a contribution to quality assurance in translation and interpretation in this area. The data base is available online and contains 72 entries in German, Arabic, English, Russian and Serbian as well as 83 entries in German and Russian. An enlargement of the data base is planned in order to extend the existing entries to all languages and integrate more languages.

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Creation of a terminology data base for the Austrian Asylum Law.pdf