STRUNA is a database of Croatian Special Field Terminology. It was officially inaugurated on the web in February 2012. Its aim is to gradually make available to the public the standardized Croatian terminology for all professional domains.
The Development of Croatian Special Field Terminology project started in 2007 as part of the initial coordination project launched at the initiative of the Croatian Standard Language Council, and has since been financed by the Croatian Science Foundation. The program supports the strategic values of the Foundation and fits into two basic areas of the National Strategy for Science Development – development of information technology and sociocultural transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based society. The Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics was chosen to serve as the national coordinator.
Given the pivotal role terminology plays in language development as well as professional communication, the objective of the program in a broader sense is to lay the foundation for the development of national terminology policy, to establish various forms of more structured education in this field, and to intensify long-term cooperation with national and international academic and other institutions dealing with different aspects of terminology work, with the Croatian Standards Institute and with other interested parties.
In order to fulfill these aims, principles for terminology selection and standardization as well as methods of terminology management have been established. A terminology manual was also published in the initial phase of the project (January 2008 – January 2009) by Dr. Milica Mihaljević et al. Since that time a terminology database has been developed and modified to meet the highest professional standards. It is intended to store and terminographically manage standardized and harmonized Croatian terms from various subject fields and their equivalents in English and, depending on the domain, several other European languages.
Terminology workshops are regularly organized with the aim of providing several basic modules of formal education for prospective partners in terminological work.
Experts from eighteen domains have so far joined the program with the aim of standardazing the terminology of their respective disciplines. Currently available for search are the terminologies of the following domains: aviation and air traffic, cartography and geoinformatics, chemistry, civil engineering, corrosion, dental medicine, marine engineering, mechanical engineering, polymers, and physics. Maritime terminology, anthropological terminology, and EU law terminology are in the final stage and the domains of phytomedicine, mathematics and archaeology in the process of joining the program.
The Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics provides the linguistic and terminographic verification of the terminological work in progress through the collaboration of two of its departments: the Department of General, Comparative and Computational Linguistics and the Department of the Croatian Standard Language. Chief coordinator of the Struna program has since September 2009 been Prof. Dr. Maja Bratanić.
Through establishing standardized terminology for various subject fields and professional domains, the program will gradually improve the circulation of knowledge and information in the Croatian language as well as in the broader multilingual environment. We see this as a necessary prerequisite for the very existence of Croatian as a standard language – particularly with a view toward its becoming one of the official languages of the European Union.