Terminologie et information multilingue: Aperçu des problèmes posés et recherche de solutions

Terminology and documentation have always had among their objectives that of overcoming linguistic difficulties inhibiting communication of specialized information. The ever-increasing availability of primary documents in electronic form and resultant proliferation of research possibilities pose in fundamental terms the issue of language as a tool in documentary systems. Irrespective of the research method applied, linguistic and terminological difficulties frequently compromise the selectivity or exhaustivity of responses, a problem aggravated when the information pool consulted is multilingual. Apart from problems posed by non-equivalence of concepts, instances of synonymy and homography, and morphological peculiarities of the languages involved, the user's own linguistic and documentary competence will also have a bearing on research results. Documentary informatics can no longer dispense with linguistic engineering, but must integrate into their retrieval systems terminological reference bases derived from thesauri which, apart from reformulating and broadening queries, should permit their translation into other languages.