The New Terminologies and Challenges to Preserve the Albanian Language’s Originality (The Case of the Development of Town Planning Terminology)

Abstract

The rapid unification of communication and the world’s conquest by technical and scientific English, lead us towards raising some question marks in the role that some countries should play to setting terminologies in various branches. The constant presence of borrowing raises the need to, firstly, control them, to avoid the use of unnecessary foreign words, and secondly, to avoid the generalization of the so-called, international term. Terminology work helps in cleaning and enriching the general lexicon. Town planning terminology is the linguistic material on which this article is based. It aims to analyze the state of foreign words in this terminology, use cases, the accuracy of use and the possibilities to use, instead of borrowing, the Albanian word.The national linguistic policies necessarily collide with the free choice of the terminology and they get in touch with the international liberalization requirements which let aside some concepts as the preservation of the cultural and linguistic identities. The way Albania manages the town planning terminology nowadays has been taken as a reference to reflect how the expressive abilities of the Albanian language are underestimated, thus using borrowings from the English language and establishing speech in the first place, leaving aside the language. We will not deal here with the ability of the Albanian language to express new concepts, as every language has these tools, but prior to creating new terminologies we should notice how these languages are exploited by their native speakers to embrace the new, to describe and to conceive it, and at last to make it part of the respective cultures. The problem lies in the development of the technology. Here we will focus on the description of privileged ways of linguistic enrichment in function of the tradition that every country has to elaborate terminologies. Whichever the selected way, the challenge is to make the necessary and linguistically accurate terminologies available to users, to expand new scientific knowledge. What we find interesting here is to highlight the conflict among the creation of artificial terms with come from their inaccurate translation and the users’ need to understand branches’ basic concepts. Making available to users the candidate terms which do not respect the linguistic standards, leads to communication inaccuracy. The creation of these terms should follow specific criteria which do not ignore the spontaneous creation of terms but urge the creation of standardized terms. How do we manage to equip technologically underestimated languages so as to accomplish such a challenge? This is one of the main cases which our analyses are based on.

Keywords: Terminology, Borrowings, Linguistic Identity, Town Planning Terminology.