For its 2004 Barcelona Symposium the GLAT (Groupe de Linguistique Appliquée des Télécommunications) has chosen the following theme : "The production of specialized texts "

Specialists in the fields of science and technology regularly generate large quantities of texts which are disseminated orally or in written form throughout the scientific, business and administrative communities. Sometimes, these documents are also used for the purposes of popularization or teaching.

In all of these modes of specialized communication, the person who produces the document makes decisions, either consciously or unconsciously. S/he is confronted with choices concerning the type of text, its linguistic structure, adequate terminology, specific style requirements, etc.

For the teacher working with such texts, these choices of discursive, grammatical or lexical elements are of great importance because recognizing and understanding them facilitates the acquisition of the underlying terminology and the cognitive structures of the various kinds of specialist documents. This is why the central theme has the subtitle: "Formal structure and academic acquisition".

In the area of teaching language for special purposes, technical writing and specialized translating, grammatical and textual structures are of particular interest. The analysis of these elements will allow us to improve the communicative know how of our students and future professionals. Furthermore, specialized knowledge is presented in a structured manner in order to render communication in research and the teaching of specialized fields more fluent.

Papers should address one of the following areas :

• Discursive and linguistic aspects of specialized texts
• The structures of specialized knowledge (ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, texts, databases, etc.)
• Methodological strategies for acquiring specialized knowledge and terminology.