Term banks

Abstract

Terminology is traditionally defined as the study of terms and their use. It is frequently opposed to lexicography on the grounds that the latter deals with the study of words and their meanings, while terminology is concerned with the study and representation of concepts and conceptual systems which structure any specialized domain. Term banks, also known as terminological databases or term bases, are the products of terminological work and are used in a variety of applications, ranging from information retrieval, automatic summarization, computer-assisted translation, or document indexing. Most term banks are multilingual and are used to manage verified or approved terms and ensure consistency with respect to standardized usage in a given linguistic community or in a given organization. In this chapter, we describe a number of initiatives aimed at supporting the work of the translators of the EU, namely, the IATE multilingual terminology database, probably the largest term base in the world, and the ECHA-term database, a small database of terms occurring in the REACH Directive on chemicals. The chapter also focuses on some of the challenges faced by terminologists and by translators with respect to the acquisition and representation of terms, their equivalence in multiple languages, their dissemination, and their exploitation during the translation process.