Message - 7th IAL Symposium

3B-1-O
Lichen: from genome to ecosystem in a changing world
(3B-1-O4) Submission ID: IAL0057-00006
MULTILINGUALITY IN LICHENOLOGY
Sohrabi M. 1
1 Botanical Museum, Department of Mycology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
The Ethnologue catalogued 6,912 languages spoken in the world today, many of them exist without any
developed writing systems, which brings the possibility of having them vanished or close to be extinct. At present,
writing systems have been changed by using computers and telecommunication tools. Text characters or
symbols in every language’s writing system can be simply encoded and transformed to Unicode. Nowadays, elearning
and teaching tools are being increasingly used to enhance academic studies and appear to be most effective
when based on native languages. The mother tongue is an essential condition for the development of the
intellectual, moral, and physical aspects of higher education; it enhances clarity of thought, better expression of
terms and regulates the knowledge gained by hearing from other sources. In order to promote ‘native language’based
education in lichenology, two options of multilingual web applications are convenient and functional in
both global and local scales, and are discussed. An example at a global scale is a subproject of the LIAS lichen
identification system ‘LIAS light’ (liaslight.lias.net), being at a rather advanced state and is currently consulted by
lichenologists all over the world. At a local scale, on the other hand, there is the Google-powered bilingual Iranian
lichen website MYCO-LICH (www.myco-lich.com). By applying the Google Language Tool, MYCO-LICH website
contents may be available in up to 40 languages. However, results are not yet fully satisfactory. In contrast, LIAS
light uses highly specific terminology (e.g. concerning morphological characters and secondary metabolites), up
to this time, translated by lichenologists into a total of eleven language versions (English, Chinese, Esperanto,
French, Farsi (Persian), German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish). For Iranian biology students
and researchers, the native Persian language key with its particular right-to-left script orientation has been proved
to be of considerable use. The Persian language characters were encoded in Unicode format and dynamically
converted into HTML or DELTA formats. The two mentioned websites appear to be a significant contribution to
the development of lichenology in countries where information flow still has to overcome linguistic barriers.
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