IASA 2018 Annual Conference

In the form of general comments or time-markers, the description of audio flaws and peculiarities of a sound document is part of the audio archiving practice as it formulates the link between the history of the carrier and the nature of the recorded sound, at the time of digitization. For the end user of today and tomorrow, in a context of worldwide globalization and sharing, the accessibility of audio collections cannot do without a good understandability of the idioms used in this description. Yet, we observe that the terminologies used are not the same between two countries, two institutions, two digital collections, two digitization operators. With 13 years of experience in digitizing audio carriers for the largest European institutions, Gecko has acquired a rare and valuable knowledge of these issues. In this paper, a project manager from Gecko will present a practical survey on the homogenization of the specific descriptive audio technical words, based on past and on-going digitization projects. Concrete solutions will be proposed, that avoid both inaccurate or erroneous idioms and prevent the coexistence of many different words for one audio phenomenon. The presentation also aims at opening a discussion on the topic of one-to-one idiom matches between languages, with the future in mind.