In September of 2002, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) formed a special “Working Group” (WG) dedicated to the treatment, use, and reduction of exonyms in the context of geographical names standardization. From the 6th to the 8th of April 2017, the UNGEGN-WG will be holding its 19th Meeting in Prague, Czechia. Organized by the Czech Geodetical Office, this meeting will focus on “Romanization Systems”. Detailed information about this meeting can be found here. The meeting will be held in conjunction with a meeting of the UNGEGN Working
Group on Romanization Systems (Convenor: Peeter Päll) and composed of two days
(Thursday, Friday) of paper presentations and discussions and one day (Saturday) with a bus excursion. Thursday (morning and afternoon) and Friday morning will be
devoted to the meeting of our WG on Exonyms, Friday afternoon to the meeting of the WG on Romanization Systems.

From the 12th to the 16th of March, 2017, the German city of Leipzig will be the host of the 10th international conference dedicated to exploring fundamental issues in the science of translation, or X. Internationaler Kongress zu Grundfragen der Translatologie – 10th Leipzig International Conference on Translation & Interpretation Studies.  During this conference, a special workshop will be held on the translation of names. This workshop is a part of the work being conducted by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names or UNGEGN.  Details on the conference, including sessions and registration, can be found at their website.

While recent LICTRA congresses have focussed on T&I didactics (1997), T&I competence (2004), T&I quality (2007) and international synergies in T&I research (2010), the tenth in the series will concentrate on where T&I studies stand in the light of digitalisation in the age of industry 4.0 or Internet 4.0, as the increasing use of internet technology to facilitate communication between humans, machines and products is often called. The technological building blocks of this world are cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, which describes a process whereby the computer as a stand-alone device will lose much of its importance, as a network of identifiably different “intelligent” physical objects – things – is built up in a structure that is similar to or is a development of the Internet.

The Nordic Cooperative Committee for Onomastic Research or NORNA will be holding its 47th official symposium from the 11th to the 12th of May 2017 in Lund, Sweden. The theme of this symposium will be “Bebyggelsenamnens dynamik”.  More information on this special event can be found at the website.

The symposium is jointly organized by the Institute for Language and Folklore and the Network for settlement names research, kept at the Archive Centre South in Lund. It is here that the collections of dialect and place names in the Lund archive are now located, and are available to the public. During the symposium there will be the opportunity to visit these collections.

The symposium will include a workshop on the names of -lev and -löv, open to
all contributions. The workshop is based on the various archaeological and
linguistic research in recent years, which has shed new light on this name type, both
terms of etymology, dissemination, and cultural context.

The Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland will be holding its Spring Conference from the 24th to the 27th of March in Milton, UK (near Didoct).  The conference location was selected in commemoration of the county survey volumes of Margaret Gelling. As space is filling up quickly, organizers encourage interested attendees to register soon.  For more details and registration, go to their website.

Many of the conference papers will relate to Oxfordshire and the surrounding counties but papers on all regions of Britain and Ireland will be presented. The speaker on Friday evening will be Ros Faith, on farming in woodland and in downland. Papers on place-names of Oxfordshire and the surrounding region will cover topics including: Anglo-Saxon estates, animals and place-names, field-names and archaeology. To celebrate the publication of The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, there will also be a number of papers on personal names of the area: locative surnames of Oxfordshire, South Midlands surnames, and names of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.

From the 18th to the 20th of September 2017, at the University of Namibia, an International Symposium on Place Names in Windhoek, Namibia will be held.  The theme of the conference is Critical Toponymy: Place Names in Political and Commercial Landscapes.  Details about the conference, registration, and abstract submission process can be found here.

The conference is organized by the Joint IGU/ICA Commission on Toponymy, the Unit for Language Facilitation and Empowerment at the University of the Free State (UFS), and the Department of Language and Literature Studies at the University of Namibia (UNAM)

Keynote speakers:

• Peter E. Raper (RSA): Member of the Steering Board, Joint IGU/ICA Commission on Toponymy; Research Fellow and Professor Extraordinaire in Linguistics, Unit for Language Facilitation and Empowerment, UFS
• Mathhias Brenzinger (RSA): Mellon Research Chair (African Language Diversity in the Linguistic section of the School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town), Director of CALDi (Centre for African Language Diversity), Curator of TALA (The African Language Archive).

On the 12th of May 2017, the Welsh Map Symposium 2017 or “Carto Cymru” will be take place at the National Library of Wales.  The theme of this year’s event is “Measuring Meadows: The development of estate mapping and it value in portraying the historical landscape”.  All interested map lovers, names enthusiasts, and Welsh fans are encouraged to purchase their tickets soon.  Although the Symposium is still a few months away, spaces are filling up FAST.  Information on tickets and the scheduled programme can be found here.

This event is hosted by the National Library of Wales in partnership with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates, Bangor University. Talks on the day will include a talk on the history of estate mapping by Peter Barber, Ex-Head of Maps, British Library and “Cantrefi a Cymydau: Rediscovering the Medieval Boundaries of Wales for the Digital Age” by John Dollery & Scott Lloyd, Royal Commission.

The fifth biennial conference on electronic lexicography, eLex 2017, will take place in Holiday Inn Leiden, Netherlands, from 19-21 September 2017.

The conference aims to investigate state-of-the-art technologies and methods for automating the creation of dictionaries. Over the past two decades, advances in NLP techniques have enabled the automatic extraction of different kinds of lexicographic information from corpora and other (digital) resources. As a result, key lexicographic tasks, such as finding collocations, definitions, example sentences, translations, are more and more beginning to be transferred from humans to machines. Automating the creation of dictionaries is highly relevant, especially for under-resourced languages, where dictionaries need to be compiled from scratch and where the users cannot wait for years, often decades, for the dictionary to be “completed”. Key questions to be discussed are: What are the best practices for automatic data extraction, crowdsourcing and data visualisation? How far can we get with Lexicography from scratch and what is the role of the lexicographer in this process?

The meeting will be hosted by the Institute for Dutch Language (Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal).

Starting with this year, the conference proceedings are going to be published by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o., based on Botanická 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic.