IATE and the Translation of the Legislation of the European Union: Quality, Instruments, Challenges

Abstract

IATE is the largest multilingual terminology database in the world. Its more than 8 million terms, arrayed around 1.3 million concepts, are used, day and night, by translators all over the world, and represent daily ‘food’ and ‘food for thought’ for the translators and terminologists working for the European Institutions. These numbers are truly impressive, especially as many of the entries are of good quality, but part of the same truth is that the need to record, update, prune and (re)invent such a huge amount of information, covering basically all the domains of European knowledge, is inevitably accompanied by many daunting challenges. In this paper, we are going to present you some of these issues, which many terminology practitioners will be able to recognize at a glance, though magnified manifold due to the sheer size and depth of terminological data and of the technical system containing them—legacy information, duplication, neologisms, new concepts, technical and administrative constraints, and so many more. The examples given—in French and Polish, but also often in English and Romanian—, are intended to give a glimpse of the daily, year-round challenges which are brought about by the need to provide quality, cost-effective, intelligent and intelligible translations for the more than 510 million European citizens.