Designing a multilingual terminology bank for united states translators
Sara E. Morton · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1978
Abstract A multilingual terminology bank consists of a data base of multilingual terminology and various programs to access it. The bank acts as a computerized dictionary, accessible to translators either on‐line or through hard‐copy printouts. Retrieved information consists of a record containing a term, its equivalents in other languages, and descriptive information which includes usage samples, synonyms, definitions, and grammatical information. Banks currently operate in Canada and Europe where they have proved extremely useful to translators. A terminology bank for the United States is being designed at Carnegie‐Mellon University, in a project undertaken jointly by the Translation Center and the Department of Computer Science. Surveys, interviews, and reviews of the literature have been used to design a bank suitable for a small, relatively impoverished sponsoring institution. The bank is to serve technical translators either on‐line or off‐line, with a data base consisting of records of English, German, French, Spanish, or Russian terms used in business or engineering. The bank will begin operation with procedures only to enter and retrieve terms; later, more complex facilities will be added.