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Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English volume

Introduction (printed edition)

Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English vol.
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History

The first edition

In 1953, the Population Commission of the United Nations requested the preparation of a Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, a task in which the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) offered to collaborate. In 1955, an ad hoc Committee under the chairmanship of P. Vincent of France was established to prepare the English, French and Spanish versions of the Dictionary. The Committee included as members: C.E. Dieulefait (Argentina), H.F. Dorn (United States), E. Grebenik (United Kingdom), P. Luzzato-Fegiz (Italy), M. Pascua (Switzerland) and J. Ros Jimeno (Spain). The French and English versions of the Dictionary were published in 1958 and the Spanish version in 1959. Versions in ten other languages appeared between that date and 1971.

The second edition

Because of the rapid development of demography and population studies during the 1960s, in 1969 the Population Commission recommended the updating of the Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, a task that was pursued once more in collaboration with IUSSP. A new Committee on International Demographic Terminology was set up under the chairmanship of P. Paillat (France) and started work in 1972 with financial support from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Other members of the Committee were: A. Boyarski (USSR), E. Grebenik (United Kingdom), K. Mayer (Switzerland), J. Nadal (Spain) and S. Kono (Japan). The Committee submitted a revised draft to the consideration of a hundred or so demographic centres that provided comments. In 1976, Prof. Louis Henry was commissioned by IUSSP to edit the work and produce the second edition of the Dictionary in French. IUSSP then requested Prof. Etienne van de Walle to adapt and translate the French second edition into English. The second edition in English was published in 1982. Eventually, the second edition would be issued in all official languages of the United Nations.

From the second edition to Demopædia

The series of Multilingual Demographic Dictionaries is one of the most enduring products in the history of demography and one of the most fruitful thanks to the work and engagement of scholars who have translated the original French or English versions into their own languages. As a result of those efforts, the international community can benefit today from access to 14 language versions of the second edition of the Demographic Dictionary, mainly thanks to the initiative undertaken by Nicolas Brouard in compiling the out-of-print versions of the Dictionaries in different languages and developing a Wiki-based presentation of all of them as a web-accessible Multilingual Demographic Dictionary. The United Nations Population Division, IUSSP and the Comité national français of the IUSSP have all supported this work in order to facilitate access to these valuable reference texts.

Why on-line?

Because the Demographic Dictionaries in various languages were conceived as tools to serve people in many countries, making them accessible via the Internet was thought mandatory. Today, thanks to the project led by Nicolas Brouard, standard demographic terminology and its meaning is only two clicks away for students, teachers, professors, researchers, government officials, journalists, non-governmental organizations and the public at large, all working in their own languages.

Functionality

Visitors to Demopædia can consult the different language modules, read them, or download and print them. All copyright owners have made this possible. Users can search for a demographic term, surf between linked terms and expressions, or switch to another language or edition. Because each Dictionary consists of thematic chapters, terms are located in context, providing not only a definition of each term but also an understanding of the subject matter for which a term is relevant. Each language module has a built-in index that facilitates navigation and cross-referencing. In addition, the Wiki platform provides powerful tools for further development. It is envisaged that the next stage of the project will allow specialists to post additions, revisions or corrections to the second edition.

What is next?

Demographic knowledge made huge advances since the last editions of the Dictionary have been published. There is a clear sense that the structure and texts need updating. Doing it in a traditional format of 'live' panels and working groups would be hardly feasible. Developing on-line a renewed edition of multilingual encyclopedic demographic dictionary should be efficient and will unleash the potential of wide cooperation of professionals. Demopædia will host this project.

Demopædia also has the potential to become a platform for sharing and building a wider knowledge base in demography and population studies. Our vision is an extensive and constantly evolving encyclopedia on population, serving the world community and benefiting from influxes of ideas and texts.


For an unified second edition of the dictionaries as an intermediate step

Since the training in Marrakech, a lot of work has been done to improve the quality of the scanned texts. Specific computer programs using parsers have cross check the texts of the first and second editions in about 12 to 13 languages in order to detect the missing text terms in one or another language.

The first analysis of this work reveals that the second edition is not as rigorous as the first was. The first edition was the result of the Commission on terminology during the mid 50's, but the second was first revised in French in 1981 and translated and adapted to English in 1982 and in Spanish in 1985, German in 1987 etc. up to Czech in 2005.

Some terms, expressions and even complete paragraphs have not been translated into English, but in Spanish, Arabic, German etc.. And a few sentences and paragraphs have been added into the English second edition but never translated into the French second edition which was already published. Also the Spanish second edition added a few new text terms which are not translated into any other language but Arabic.

The German second edition (1987) defined a lot of more modern text terms which haven't been translated in any other language.

Editions, published after 1987, did not add any new term and thus a natural limit is 1987 (German) but harmonization between the three languages of the IUSSP could be an important step.

In many language specific editions, the numbering of the text terms differed (even between French and English) most of times due to errors but sometimes because a text term was not translated. The advantage of the technical work is to highlight the missing text terms in order to decide if the word is not used in this language or if it is an omission.