
The World Language Documentation Centre, together with Bangor University and Language Standards for Global Business, wishes to announce a major multidisciplinary conference to celebrate 2008 as the International Year of Languages
August 22-23, 2008
To be held at the Bangor University Business Management Conference Centre
This event is supported by the Welsh Assembly Government and the UK National Committee to UNESCO
The United Nations announced that 2008 would be the International Year of Languages, recognizing the importance of multilingualism in supporting international understanding. The GUM3C conference will attempt to bridge the communications gap between academia and industry, asking (and attempting to answer) such questions:
- How can industry help academia prioritize its research in the 3 Ms?
- What are the developing standards, who are developing them and will they be used?
- How will this generate peace, prosperity and global understanding?
Keynote Speakers
Christian Galinski, Director of Infoterm and Secretary of ISO TC/37
David Crystal, Honorary Professor, Bangor University
Richard Ennals, Director of the UK National Commission for UNESCO
Call for papers:
Full papers and poster submissions are invited for peer-review that present original and unpublished contributions to the themes of:
- protection, curation and preservation of languages and cultures
- resources for less-resourced languages
- infrastructural support for multilingualism
- language description and documentation
- ethnicity, identity and language
- multimodal communications and support for disabilities
- web-corpus linguistics
- challenges and benefits of the multilingual internet
- multimedia ontologies and the semantic/pragmatic web
and topics generally related to challenges for terminologies, lexica, ontologies, and related content resources.
Call for workshops:
Submissions for dedicated workshops are encouraged. Workshop organizers should submit calls to the conference committee, identifying target audience, workshop topics, workshop organizers and their affiliations. Workshops aimed at SMEs and the software, translation and creative industry sectors are especially welcome. The conference has the use of a dedicated IT suite with 25 computer terminals for the conference (details can be found here) and so is able to host specialist hands-on workshops. Other seminar rooms available have good quality presentation equipment including data projectors and large screens.
Important dates:
Submission deadline |
May 15, 2008 |
Notification |
June 15, 2008 |
Registration and camera ready copy |
June 30, 2008 |
Final author manuscripts will be 8.5" x 11" (two columns IEEE format:). Full papers should not exceed 8 pages. Poster submissions not exceeding 4 pages. Word template and formatting instructions can be found here.
All initial enquiries should be sent to info@thewldc.org
Administrative Committee:
Debbie Garside (Chair) , CEO WLDC
Delyth Prys (Secretary), Bangor University, UK
Chris Cox, GLMDR Quality and Compliance Manager
Mike Roberts, Chairman, BSI/TC TS/1
Lee Gillam, University of Surrey, UK.
Anja Drame, Info Term
Eva-Maria Leitner, Language Standards for Global Business Chairperson
Scientific Committee:
Anja Drame, InfoTerm
Anthony Aristar, Linguist List
Chris Cox, GLMDR Quality and Compliance Manager
Debbie Garside, CEO, WLDC
Delyth Prys, Bangor University
Don Osborn, Bisharat
Doug Ewell, IETF
Eva-Maria Leitner, Language Standards for Global Business Chairperson
Gerard Meijssen, OmegaWiki
Gerhard Budin, Chairman, ISO/TC 37 SC2
Havard Hjulstad, Chairman, ISO/TC 37 and ISO/TC 37 SC2 WG1
Jennifer de Camp, MITRE
John Cowan, IETF
Jonathan Amith, Yale University
Karen Broome, Industry Expert
Khaled Fattal, CEO, Multilingual Internet Names Consortium
Laurent Romary, Director, Max-Planck Digital Library
Lee Gillam, University of Surrey
Maosong Sun, Tsinghua University Beijing
Martin Benjamin, Kamusi Project
Michael Everson, Unicode Consortium Registrar for ISO 15924
Mike Roberts, Chairman, BSI/TC TS/1
Peter Austin, SOAS
Peter Wittenburg, Technical Director, Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Sue Ellen Wright, Kent State University Institute for Applied Linguistics
Social Events
The timing of the conference will coincide with The Bryn Terfel Gala and participants will be able to enjoy the evening concerts at this internationally renowned festival. See http://www.brynfest.com for more details.
Travel and Accommodation
Good quality accommodation is available at a reasonable Price at Bangor University either at the Business Management Centre or at the Halls of Residence. All rooms are en-suite and have Internet facilities etc.
Airports with Transport Links to Bangor
Both Liverpool and Manchester airports are within a 1.5 hour drive from Bangor. London airports are also within reach and may be combined with rail travel.
Bangor is located on the direct London to Holyhead railway line.
There is also the possibility of a shuttle bus for people coming in via Manchester airport.
Dublin is also possible for people flying in - fast ferry is only 99 minutes to Holyhead and a 20 minute ride to Bangor.




