Multilingual Terminology Work in Theory – and in Practice

In theory, multilingual terminology work is done by creating concept diagrams in each of the languages and comparing them to establish equivalences between concepts in the two languages. In practice, however, various terminology management systems (TMS) are used, end these systems hardly ever support the ideal working method. First of all, only very few integrate adequate tools for modelling concept systems. Second, the data structure and the user interface do not support the process of linking entries in two languages. Concerning the data structure, the understanding of “concept oriented” plays a major role. In many cases the concept is perceived as a unit at the interlingual level, and in the data structure an entry corresponds to
one concept with terms from several languages connected. In other cases, the concept is seen as language-specific, and in the data structure an entry contains equivalent concepts from the languages under consideration. In this paper, we illustrate the clash between theory and practice with an example, and outline the requirements for an optimal data structure and user interface
that would allow theory and practice to meet.