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Consistent, harmonized and easily accessible terminology is an extremely important stronghold for ensuring true multilingualism in the European Union and throughout the world. From legislation and trade to the needs and mobility of each individual, terminology is the key for easy, fast and reliable communications. The rapid path of changes in technologies and the global economy leads to ever growing introduction of new concepts and terms to describe them. Globalization from the one side and growing language awareness from the other side dictate the need to consolidate national terminology resources, harmonize international terminology, and provide online access to reliable multilingual terminology.
A short description of EuroTermBank project can be seen here.
EuroTermBank Consortium Launches Multilingual Terminology Portal
The EuroTermBank Consortium has announced the launch of its multilingual terminology portal www.eurotermbank.com, a Pan-European term bank providing a consolidated interface to comprehensive terminology resources on the Web. As of March 2007, it enables searching within approximately 600,000 terminology entries containing over 1.5 million terms in various languages. The initial focus of EuroTermBank is on the “new Europe”, including Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish terms and their equivalents in English, German, French and other languages (overall, more than 20 languages are involved). The EuroTermBank Consortium continues to integrate all available terminology resources into the EuroTermBank database, or interlink them via EuroTermBank as a central terminology gateway.
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As a single point of service, the EuroTermBank portal provides a consolidated search interface to its central database as well as other national and international terminology banks. It can be easily expanded by importing or interlinking new terminology resources. Its unique compounding technology enables the user to compare potentially matching terms across all terminology collections and languages. For registered users, forum features are available. Content providers have the option to add or edit their resources online.
“With eight partners from seven European countries, this project bridges the worlds of terminology, specialized lexicography and computational linguistics of the “new” and the “old” Europe. Novel in all aspects, from its best practice methodology in terminology management and data modeling to the model of handling IPR issues and the application of state-of-the-art open standards, it features a most abundant collection of multilingual terminology for the language industry”, says Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dirk Schmitz, Institute for Information Management at Cologne University of Applied Science.
The new terminology portal is particularly useful for translators, localizers, terminologists, editors and everyone in the linguistics field; it is a reliable source of information for researchers, educators, students, and other end-users. As a terminology sharing tool, it can serve organizations wishing to publish its terminology collections, either to the general public or to selected audiences. As a terminology Web service, it will be of interest to software developers planning to integrate terminology services in their tools.
The portal uses a comprehensive data structure developed in accordance with ISO 12620 and ISO 16642. To narrow the search, all terms are categorized by subject field according to Eurovoc, the official multilingual thesaurus of the EU. Easy data exchange with content providers and the user community is achieved by use of TBX, the standard LISA terminology data exchange format. EuroTermBank applies Infoterm’s methodology known as Code of Good Practice for Copyright in Terminology, to ensure proper treatment of content providers’ rights.
About the EuroTermBank Consortium
The EuroTermBank Consortium was founded by project partners under the European Union eContent program. The EuroTermBank Consortium members are:
Tilde, Latvia (host and coordinator)
Institute for Information Management at Cologne University of Applied
Science, Germany
Centre for Language Technology at University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Institute of Lithuanian Language, Lithuania
Terminology Commission of Latvian Academy of Science, Latvia
MorphoLogic, Hungary
University of Tartu, Estonia
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