There are some places where academics pretend not to feel a real need to translate the English TEL thesaurus, it seems that English is there working language. As a matter of fact, if I hear that from German or Dutch colleagues, it is not the case for the French or the Spanish, and few others. Moreover, there is a part of the world where this translation (or at least transliteration) is needed: Asia. The key reason is the necessity to express the TEL terms and expressions with Chinese ideograms. So, the translation has been carried out. It was an occasion to realise that there is not one Chinese language, but at least two: Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Moreover, in our domain, beyond these distinctions, there are differences in the terms chosen in Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong or Mainland China.

Some examples: "animated pedagogical agent" sound uncommon and does find easily an equivalent in Chinese. "Authoring system" sounds uncommon as well and has no standardised translation. The term "epistemic" is difficult to understand (possibly as it is for English speakers as well) and to translate, and the same applu to "external script" and "internal script". An other interesting case is that of "learning object which is an old term in our area, however in the translation process, it transmutes itself into "learning target"... Actually, such issues appear in several other languages, just the Chinese transliteration-translation makes it much more visible.

Here we see the benefit from having a dictionary which proposes definitions, historical notes, and additional comments about the meaning of a term or an expression. This dictionary is an essential means to facilitate the navigation across languages. The construction of the Chinese Thesaurus is an occasion to realise that.

TEL Dictionary: Traditional Chinese entries
http://thesaurus.telearn.org/TEL_Dictionary_entries/zh-hant
Edited by Tak-Wai Chan (National Central University, Taiwan, TW), Lung Hsiang Wong (Learning Sciences Laboratory, Singapore, SG)


TEL Dictionary: Simplified Chinese entries
http://thesaurus.telearn.org/TEL_Dictionary_entries/zh-hans
Edited by Carsten Ullrich (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CN), Denis Gillet (EPFL, CH), Lung Hsiang Wong (Learning Sciences Laboratory, Singapore, SG) & participants to the SJTU Chinese-European Summer School Matchmaking Event on Technology-Enhanced Learning