Staff members of the department collaborate with an extensive network of colleagues, both locally and internationally. There are close ties with the Department for Information Sciences and Natural Language Processing at the University of Hildesheim, Germany and with the Department of African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, Belgium.

The department is also instrumental in a collaborative project for the establishment of an Open Education Resource Term Bank. The project is housed by the University of Pretoria and The University of Cape Town, with Elsabé Taljard, Adelia Carstens (Unit for Academic Literacy) from UP, and Mbulungeni Madiba from UCT as joint project leaders. The aim is to create a terminological tool which can serve as pedagogical support tool to South African students. This tool will be made available to participating universities under a creative commons licence. Access will be via the various online learning systems of the various universities. The assumption is that the majority of SA students are exposed to a tertiary education system where the language of teaching and learning is not the L1. The underlying assumption is that giving these students access to an internet-based terminology data bank, which contains not only term equivalents for key concepts in the African languages, but also additional conceptual information and guidance on usage of terms, should aid in the conceptualisation of subject content. The tool is planned as an organic one, with terminology being developed within actual pedagogical situations. Persons who may be interested in contributing terminologically relevant material such as term lists or multilingual glossaries, are welcome to contact any of the project leaders: Elsabé Taljard, [email protected], Adelia Carstens, [email protected] or Mbulungeni Madiba, [email protected].