Terminology in the age of multilingual corpora

Abstract

Terminology management has long played an important role in translation and localisation. It has been asserted, however, that the need for terminology management is declining with the rise of widely accessible aligned multilingual corpora, such as bi-texts. In this view, translators will be able to identify terms and their translations by using previous translations to automatically identify the best translation for a term. This article, however, argues that while bi-text resources will assist in human-oriented terminology management, they will actually increase the need for skilled terminology work and termbases. Furthermore, because more tools will generate terminological data, the need for exchange between tools will increase. After discussing the case for terminology management and terminology exchange in the age of aligned multilingual corpora, the paper describes the role of the TermBase eXchange (TBX) standard in terminology exchange, including typical scenarios for its use, and some of the challenges faced in using it.