Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2019

The redevelopment of the European Union’s interinstitutional terminology database IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe) has been an opportunity to rethink the technologies, architecture and data structure of the system in order to prepare it for future challenges, including interoperability, modularity, scalability and data exchange, among other things. This article describes which strategies are being put in place to allow IATE data – one of the largest multilingual terminology databases in the world – to be consumed by third-party tools, particularly computer-assisted translation environments (CATEs). The modernisation of the application, aligning it with the latest software and systems engineering standards and technologies for the benefit of all users and for improved data management by EU linguists, is also described.

Linguistic resources available in the form of open data are an essential source of information for creating e-dictionaries, but access to these linguistic resources is still limited. This paper presents a method for maximising use of open access linguistic resources and integrating them into specialised e-dictionaries. The method combines automatic compilation of terminology data with the creation of specialised linguistic corpora to produce a Catalan version of the IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe) database. The paper presents new methodological advances applied here to the production of terminological e-dictionaries, using open access linguistic resources. We observe that, as a result of this new methodology, the Catalan version of the IATE will be able to include specialised economics, law and health dictionaries. In conclusion, the new methodology presented here permits the creation of new models of specialised e-dictionaries, facilitates the compilation of terminology in any language and unifies the access format for terminology data.

The article reports on the eLex² project, which involves designing dictionary software adjusted to the specific needs of legal translators. On the basis of a careful analysis of target user needs and the characteristics of the discipline involved, we defined a set of parameters that should be met by the final product. The resulting prototype offers a number of novel solutions, including a division into sub-dictionaries assigned to different problem complexes in translation, a classification of headwords according to their relations of equivalence with parallel institutions in the secondary legal system, or a special classification of equivalents. The ultimate goal is to make available an application that can be used for compiling and publishing law dictionaries for translators working in various language pairs.

Reutilization and interoperability are major issues in the fields of knowledge representation and extraction, as reflected in initiatives such as the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data Cloud. This paper shows how terminological resources can be integrated and reused within different types of application. EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on environmental science that integrates conceptual, linguistic and visual information. It has led to the following by-products: (i) the EcoLexicon English Corpus; (ii) EcoLexiCAT, a terminology-enhanced translation tool; and (iii) Manzanilla, an image annotation tool. This paper explains EcoLexicon and its by-products, and shows how the latter exploit and enhance the data in the TKB.

The advent of the Semantic Web and of the Linked Data initiative have contributed to new perspectives and opportunities regarding terminology work. Among them are the double dimension approach and the theoretical perspective of ontoterminology anchored therein, which explore the synergies resulting from the systematic organisation of both term systems and concept systems. By doing so, they provide a theoretical and methodological foundation underlying the creation of knowledge-based terminological products that can support the conception and development of different types of e‑dictionaries. Within that scope, and based on examples pertaining to two different subject fields, namely endometriosis and Islamic archaeology, this article aims to propose a framework for the creation of a terminological e-dictionary, defined as a reference resource in a specific domain that gathers, structures and describes linguistic data in a systematic way in one, two or more languages, in order to define concepts that are denoted by terms.