Joining nations 1947-1990

JOINING NATIONS

of the IIW, while his service on the Technical Committee gave him a greater insight into the problems affecting Commissions other than his own than any previous President. His assumption of the Presi– dency was however unfortunately overshadowed by the death, early in 1969, of his friend and compatriot, Paul Goldschmidt-Clermont, the Founder President. At its following meeting, the Governing Council decided to commemorate the contribution made by Mr Goldschmidt- Clermont by a triennial medal bearing his name to be awarded to the best film entered in a competition organised for this purpose. In other respects, however, Professor Soete became President at an auspicious moment. The 1969 Assembly was held in Kyoto, Japan, and was remarkably successful from every point of view. By comparison with an attendance of some 700 participants at the 1968 Assembly, enrolments amounted to 950, those from Western Europe being so numerous as to warrant the IIW chartering two planes for the journey to Japan. Since part of the IIW's income was derived from enrolment fees, it was obvious that revenue for I 969 would be greater than expected, thus enabling the Executive Council, for the first and last time, to table a proposal to reduce the budgeted national subscriptions in the following year. Indeed already in I 968 more than 50% of the IIW's income came from 'trading' activities - enrolment fees, publications, royalties, etc - and this trend was set to continue for several years. At the beginning of Professor Soete's term of office the IIW was demonstrably prosperous, well-supported and active, the publisher of two periodicals and with some 20 other works currently on sale. In the area of international co-operation, an increasing number of the Commissions were producing drafts to serve as a basis for ISO standards while the representative of the IIW on the Union of International Technical Associations, Professor Jaeger, had just been elected its President. This did not, however, affect the discontinuance of the subventions which, as a member of the Union, the IIW received up to 1966 in respect of its work on terminology and documentation. A change of policy within UNESCO was the reason for the suspension of these payments which affected adversely the publishers of the IIW's Multilingual Collection of Terms (MCT) and Bibliographical Bulletin. In 1969, the Swiss member of the IIW which had published the MCT since 1953 gave notice of its decision on financial grounds to terminate the publishing contract. At the 1970 Assembly, held in Lausanne, the Governing Council adopted an alternative scheme under which the countries whose languages appeared in each section

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