Translating Law into a Dictionary. A Terminographic Model

Firstly, the methodological approach which was adopted in order to create the model is delineated. It is based on the combined specialist knowledge of three disciplines, namely terminography, translation studies and law. Subsequently, the notion of the translation dictionary as a separate type of terminological dictionary is presented, with particular emphasis on the unit of translation and translation equivalence. The following part of the paper characterises translation of legal texts and its implications concerning the needs of the translator as well as the role of the dictionary in the translation process. Finally, the paper proposes a model dictionary, constructed according to the methodological rules determined at the beginning and in the light of the conclusions drawn from the following analysis

Unvollendetes: the Oxford Plato lexicon

In one obvious sense this paper is a misfit within a book that otherwise charts so much achievement. The unfinished project that it describes occupied the attention of two Scottish professors and, in its later reincarnation, a distinguished German academic, himself subsequently a professor, for a total of thirty-six years. Publishing projects that come to nothing are often at least as interesting as those that come to fruition; they will never be able to claim significance, but they may instead provide mystery or perhaps a salutary lesson. I offer two excuses for unearthing the story of the Plato Lexicon. First, it is reasonably well documented; second, it illustrates a number of features about the history of classical scholarship and publishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although in one sense the story is incomplete and remains a mystery, the answers to several important questions are clear enough: how and why the project came into being, how it was undertaken, and why it failed

Medical WordNet: A new methodology for the construction and validation of information resources for consumer health

A consumer health information system must be able to comprehend both expert and non-expert medical vocabulary and to map between the two. We describe an ongoing project to create a new lexical database called Medical WordNet (MWN), consisting of medically relevant terms used by and intelligible to non-expert subjects and supplemented by a corpus of natural-language sentences that is designed to provide medically validated contexts for MWN terms. The corpus derives primarily from online health information sources targeted to consumers, and involves two sub-corpora, called Medical FactNet (MFN) and Medical BeliefNet (MBN), respectively. The former consists of statements accredited as true on the basis of a rigorous process of validation, the latter of statements which non-experts believe to be true. We summarize the MWN / MFN / MBN project, and describe some of its applications

In no uncertain terms : a dataset for monolingual and multilingual automatic term extraction from comparable corpora

Automatic term extraction is a productive field of research within natural language processing, but it still faces significant obstacles regarding datasets and evaluation, which require manual term annotation. This is an arduous task, made even more difficult by the lack of a clear distinction between terms and general language, which results in low inter-annotator agreement. There is a large need for well-documented, manually validated datasets, especially in the rising field of multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora, which presents a unique new set of challenges. In this paper, a new approach is presented for both monolingual and multilingual term annotation in comparable corpora. The detailed guidelines with different term labels, the domain- and language-independent methodology and the large volumes annotated in three different languages and four different domains make this a rich resource. The resulting datasets are not just suited for evaluation purposes but can also serve as a general source of information about terms and even as training data for supervised methods. Moreover, the gold standard for multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora contains information about term variants and translation equivalents, which allows an in-depth, nuanced evaluation

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Meaningfulness, the unsaid and translatability. Instead of an introduction

The present paper opens this topical issue on translation techniques by drawing a theoretical basis for the discussion of translational issues in a linguistic perspective. In order to forward an audience- oriented definition of translation, I will describe different forms of linguistic variability, highlighting how they present different difficulties to translators, with an emphasis on the semantic and communicative complexity that a source text can exhibit. The problem is then further discussed through a comparison between Quine's radically holistic position and the translatability principle supported by such semanticists as Katz. General translatability — at the expense of additional complexity — is eventually proposed as a possible synthesis of this debate. In describing the meaningfulness levels of source texts through Hjelmslevian semiotics, and his semiotic hierarchy in particular, the paper attempts to go beyond denotative semiotic, and reframe some translational issues in a connotative semiotic and metasemiotic perspective