The Internet serves as an infinite source of translation resources. In addition to the everyday online tools such as dictionaries, grammar forums, encyclopedias, academic publications, and the like, occasionally one can discover other very useful tools. For example, this week I visited for the first time the European Union’s termbase search tool: IATE.
IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe) is a multilingual search tool for terminology developed and used by some of the principal institutions of the EU (the European Commission, the Central Bank, the Parliament, and the Translation Center, among others). The system allows for carrying out searches in any of the official languages of the EU (which, since the accession of Croatia this July, now has 28 full-member states) and receiving search results in one or several of these languages.
Additionally, the search tool provides the option of refining searches by field, such as politics, international relations, science, legislation, etc. The results are displayed on forms containing relevant information according to the case, such as a term´s definition, source, and use in context, as well as the estimated reliability of the search (indicated with a visual five-star ranking system that mirrors that used by the old movie critics).
The IATE project began in 1999, when the decision was made to build an online infrastructure to store all the terminological resources of the EU. Its goal is to standardize and bring greater visibility to this information, which has been available to the general public since 2007. Currently, IATE has 8.4 million terms covering all of the 23 official languages of the European Union, including more than half a million abbreviations and approximately 130,000 phrases.
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