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How do you translate categorical data into Maltese and what does metadata mean?

Such statistical terms, which journalists, accountants, economists and students use every day and are very difficult to translate into Maltese, have been collected into a book by the National Statistics Office on the occasion of the International Year of Statistics.

Eight years after the then Director of Statistics, Alfred Camilleri, came up with the idea, the NSO yesterday launched the Bilingual Glossary of Statistical Terms compiled by Joe Felice Pace, who is a former Times of Malta parliamentary correspondent and the editor of Joseph Aquilina’s two-volume Maltese to English dictionary.

NSO director general Michael Pace Ross said the glossary’s purpose was to promote statistical literacy as a concept and in practice.

“We have been thinking about this project for many years because we receive many queries to explain specific statistical terms or on how a word should be translated into Maltese. We finally have all the answers through this publication,” he said.

We have been thinking about this project for many years

The book is organised along simple and straightforward lines with the two sets of contents – English and Maltese – anchored in the main body of the definitions. The same contents locate definitions of the statistical classifications, which are in a dedicated section.

Mr Felice Pace said an effort was made to keep the definitions concise and useable.