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The present survey-based study aimed at investigating the principles of social constructivist education in undergraduate translator training programs in Iran. To this aim, a needs assessment was conducted to identify market demands and students’ needs for three constructivist principles of authenticity, collaboration and scaffolding. Translation instructors, as the third group of stakeholders, were further surveyed about their teaching approach in terms of the three categories. To find out whether current translation education in Iran reflects market demands and students’ needs with respect to the mentioned constructivist concepts, the results of the surveys were then compared. Upon data analysis, it became evident that scaffolding, indicating students as responsible learners and teachers providing adequate support for the formers’ learning, was the most important principle for the first two groups of participants. Scaffolding was similarly described by translation instructors as the most common principle in their teaching approach. On the other hand, while professional translators and students consider authenticity as the second most important principle, it was profoundly lacking in the teaching approach university instructors take. Therefore, the results suggest that there is a big gap between the current and the desired situation in Iranian undergraduate translator training programs for the principle of “authenticity”, i.e. working on real translation projects with students taking various roles reflecting the real professional translation practice. The demographic information elicited from the surveys also provided evidence for this lacking connection between academia and professional translation practice in Iran.

The aim of the present article is to show how the holistic approach of a “simulated translation bureau” (STB), bringing together many technological skills that would otherwise be taught separately in isolated course units, succeeds in familiarising translation students with the new ways of working and with new technologies.

International audience

In this paper, we will present the preliminary results of an educational innovation project in which we assess the use of virtual meeting technologies in higher education programmes of interpreting and translation, more specifically the master programmes of interpreting and translation at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). One of the research objectives of the current project is to test the possibilities of virtual conference tools supporting situated learning activities, i. e. learning activities simulating the conditions of the professional reality in a learner-, situation- and experience-based environment. Our second research objective is to assess the usability of virtual conference tools as pedagogical tools to support translation and interpreting classes that are based on the premises of socio-constructivist teaching. The research is carried out in the context of two different courses which were supported by a virtual conference tool: in particular an interpreting workshop and a group feedback session in a translation workshop. ispartof: Trans-kom vol:11 issue:2 pages:220-237 status: Published online

In recent years, much attention has been devoted to professionalisation in translator education. As a result, many different pedagogical activities have been proposed, focusing on the question of how students can acquire professional skills during their studies. This chapter will focus on one such pedagogical activity, i.e. the organisation of Simulated Translation Bureaus (STBs), in which students work on translation projects obtained from real (or fictitious) clients. The aim of the activity is to imitate as best as possible the tasks that translators face in real translation projects. In this chapter, the authors will argue that collaboration between STBs through virtual networks can increase the degree of authenticity in simulated translation workflows. In the first part of this chapter, consideration will be bestowed upon the underlying reasons for the implementation of STBs in translation curricula. In the second part, possibilities for collaboration in the context of INSTB will be discussed.

International audience

In this article we will present a research project in which we aim to compare the use of online and/or mobile virtual communication tools in two master programmes of interpreting and translation. Since this project was only recently launched, we will focus on the general objectives of the project, the planned activities and the expected impact.

In this chapter, a translation resource is presented covering intra- and interlingual terminological variants extracted from a multilingual corpus of parallel texts (i.e. source texts and their translations). The resource is one of the outcomes of two comparative studies focusing on intra- and interlingual terminological variation in a trilingual parallel corpus and in the IATE terminology base. Several questions will be addressed in this chapter relating to (1) the method according to which this type of resource is developed, (2) the way the translation data in this resource are structured and (3) the way these data could be exploited and visualised in a translation tool.

Quality in translator training has received much attention since the launch of the European Master’s in Translation network in 2009, which sets out quality requirements for translator training programmes in universities. Projects such as OPTIMALE (2010-13) sought to raise the profile of the translation profession whereas the OTCT/Tradutech project (2014-16) aimed to introduce and integrate professionally-oriented practices in a classroom context. Among the drivers for improving the quality of translator training are professionalisation and employability. One method for integrating professionalisation and employability practices into translator training is through the implementation of a simulated translation bureau component into the curriculum as authentic experiential learning. Thelen (2016a, 2016b) and Vandepitte (2008) provide an overview of how simulated translation bureaus can be run successfully within a tertiary education setting. Building on the work of Thelen and Vandepitte, this paper aims to present a broad perspective of the current professionalisation and employability practices embedded in translation curricula throughout European universities. We begin our investigations at INSTB, the International Network of Simulated Translation Bureaus. INSTB (pronounced “instib”) is a network of universities offering translation curricula where students are tasked with staffing and running their own (simulated) translation bureau. At INSTB’s full member institutions, the simulated bureaus are an integral part of the curriculum and earn credit points. At the time of writing, INSTB includes participating universities from the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. This paper reviews the current practices surrounding the simulated translation bureaus implemented by INSTB members. Our review suggests that authentic experiential learning through simulated translation bureaus is extremely well received by students, welcomed by teachers and highly valued by employers.

The use of digitalised text corpora in combination with corpus processing tools have significantly advanced descriptive research methods in translation studies. Corpora allow us to study the textual and linguistic features of translations, taking into account different contextual parameters that have an impact on translation choices and, ultimately, the translation product. In the context of translation, studying corpora was initially a method carried out by the translation scholar in order to confirm or reject certain theoretical claims about translations (Toury 1995; Halverson 1998; Laviosa 1998a; Laviosa 1998b). More recently, corpora have gradually found their way in the translation classroom (Zanettin, Bernardini & Stewart 2003; Bernardini 2006; Beeby, Inés & Sánchez-Gijón 2009; Vaezian 2009) and have become an integral part of the translation workflow in certain professional contexts (Bowker & Pearson 2002; Bernardini 2006; Gallego-Hernández 2015). Corpora are now increasingly used by professional translators for different (very often pragmatic) reasons: e.g. studying the meaning, connotation, collocational behaviour,... of a word in the source text or, finding its translation equivalents in a corpus of target texts. The rationale for using parallel corpora (i.e. a collection of source texts and their translations) to find translation equivalents can obviously vary among translators. In certain cases, translators already have a translation equivalent in mind but still tend to consult a corpus to find confirmation for their 'translation hypothesis'. Such translators are looking for 'expected' patterns of equivalence but may sometimes – in their search for specific patterns – also encounter 'unexpected' translations. In other cases, translators may have little clue of how a pattern (word, term, expression) in the source text can be rendered in the target text and hope to find a proper (possibly unexpected) solution in the corpus. In this chapter, we will show how a corpus-based approach was applied to quantitative and qualitative comparisons of term variants and their translations in EU parallel texts in order to search for (un)expected patterns in the treatment of term variation in EU translations.

Collecting, studying and managing terms and their translations in multilingual terminological resources are essential steps to be carried out within a terminography workflow. This article starts from the observation that this activity is to a large extent still determined by a traditional conviction that terms should be used unambiguously to refer to clearly delineated concepts in order to arrive at unambiguous communication (Wüster 1979; Felber 1984; Picht and Draskau 1985). Consequently, this view or conviction has a major impact on the function, design and implementation of many ‘structured’ terminological products such as terminological databases, glossaries or dictionaries. Looking at terms and their translations from a descriptive point of view – i.e. by studying term occurrences and their translations in parallel, specialised texts – we argue that ‘structured’ terminology resources are not able to fully cover the different ‘linguistic options’ found in texts to refer to specialised knowledge in different cognitive, situational and linguistic contexts. We will illustrate this point on the basis of a comparative study between a parallel corpus comprised of English EU source texts and their translations into French and Dutch and a selection of terminological records from the EU's IATE terminology base . We will report on how the research was carried out (applying a corpus-driven method), present the major qualitative and quantitative findings and discuss the implications of the research for the way the terminography workflow being taught as part of the Master’s Programme in Translation at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

In this study, term variation pertains to the different ways in which specialised knowledge in the environmental domain is expressed in English institutional texts by means of terminological designations. Intralingual variation pertains to term variation within one language, interlingual variation to the possible ways in which a given English term is translated into Dutch and French target texts. In many descriptive terminology studies, it has been pointed out that terminological variants frequently occur in different types of specialised text genres and that their presence can be motivated on different grounds (Daille 2005; Freixa 2006; Condamines 2010; Tercedor Sánchez 2011). At least two important views result from these observations: a) a view that term variants appearing in source texts should not simply be ignored by translators for the sake of terminological consistency and precision and b) a view that the different terms to express specialised knowledge as well as their possible translations should be represented in special language resources for translators, taking into account different contextual factors that may affect the choice for a specific term or translation. Based on these views, we will present a new type of translation resource that was compiled on the basis of a corpus of source and target texts. The resource covers a set of English term variants and their French and Dutch equivalents retrieved from a trilingual parallel corpus of institutional texts. Each term occurrence encountered in a source text is combined with its equivalent in the corresponding target text to form a term-based translation unit (TU). Each TU in the resource is marked by a set of semantic and text-related properties. In this article, we will discuss why and how the resource was created, present results and reflect on how it can be used by translators.

In this study, terminological variation pertains to the different ways in which specialised knowledge is expressed in written discourse by means of terminological designations. Choices regarding the use of term variants in source texts (i.e. intralingual variation) as well as the different translations of these variants in target texts (i.e. interlingual variation) are determined by a complex interplay of contextual factors of several kinds. For translators, it is therefore important to know the different language options (i.e. variants) that are available when translating terms and to know in which situational contexts certain options are more likely to be used. To this end, translators often consult bi- or multilingual translation resources (e.g. terminological databases) to find solutions to certain translation problems. Different possibilities are offered in terminological databases to represent and visualise intra- and interlingual variants. In conventional terminology bases, terms in several languages usually appear on concept-oriented term records. This particular way of structuring and visualising terminological data has its roots in prescriptive terminology in which terms are merely viewed as ‘labels’ assigned to clearly delineated concepts (Picht and Draskau 1985). In ontologically-underpinned terminological knowledge bases or TKBs, terminological data tend to be represented in networks comprised of conceptual and semantic relations (Kerremans et al. 2008; Faber 2011; Durán Muñoz 2012; Peruzzo 2013). As opposed to traditional ways of representing terminological data (e.g. on the basis of alphabetically sorted lists, tables or matrices), such networks allow for a flexible and dynamic visualisation of data that may be connected to one another in several ways. The aim of this article is to reflect on how visualisations of terms, variants and their translations in networks can be improved by taking into account the contextual constraints of the texts in which they appear. To this end, a novel type of translation resource has been developed, resulting from a semi-automatic method for identifying intralingual variants and their translations in texts. A prototype visualisation of this resource will be presented in which terms, variants and their translations appear as a contextually-conditioned network of ‘language options’. The proposed model derives from the Hallidayan premise that each language option or choice acquires its meaning against the background of other choices which could have been made. The choices are perceived as functional: i.e. they can be motivated against the backdrop of a complex set of contextual conditions (Eggins 2004). Changing these contextual conditions causes direct changes in the network of terminological options that are shown to the user.

This article presents a research study of (intra- and interlingual) term variation in the context of specialised translation. In this study, term variation pertains to the different ways in which a prototypically struc-tured unit of understanding (Temmerman, 2000) is expressed in (written) discourse by means of terminological designations. Intralingual variation pertains to term variation within one language, interlingual variation to the possible ways in which a given term is translated into a target language. Both phenomena are examined at two levels: the level of the text (i.e. variation appearing in a specific English source text and its trans-lations into Dutch and French) and the level of the corpus (i.e. variation appearing in a set or specific subset of English source texts and their French and Dutch translations).

Previous studies have pointed out that specialised dictionaries only partially meet the requirements of translators because they very often lack a specification of how a term is really used in specialised discourse (Collet, 2004a). Terms may vary depending on the type of text, the intended readership, the register, etc. (Freixa, 2006). For translators, it is important to be aware of the different factors that have an impact on term choice. They need to know what terms in the source language are commonly used to address a concept in specific communicative settings and how these terms can be translated. This article summarises an ongoing project which examines and compares terminological variation in source texts and translations. The aim of the project is to find out whether certain patterns or tendencies can be derived from this comparative study and to reflect on how the results of the study can contribute to the compilation of specialised translation dictionaries.

The internet is becoming an increasingly popular medium for publishing and consulting e-dictionaries (either free or not free of charge). The reason for its popularity is obviously due to the accessibility of this medium. Without much effort, users can e.g. easily find definitions of certain words by feeding a (simple) query like define word X to a search engine. It's clear that for users who want to quickly acquire a basic understanding of a word, an internet search engine is the best option. The internet provides new possibilities for creating, structuring, managing and accessing e-dictionaries. It has turned from an informative web into an interactive, social web where everyone can contribute to the creation of new (dictionary) content. This evolution towards "lexicographic democratisation" (Gouws, p. 28), as well as the introduction of several new (web) technologies in the field of lexicography, is gradually changing the way online lexicographical products are created and used today. These changes trigger us to raise some fundamental questions pertaining to the domain: What will be the impact of these recent developments on the future of e-lexicography? What (new) areas need to be explored or prioritised? What (new) key issues need to be tackled? Etc. These ideas form the background for E-Lexicography: The Internet, Digital Initiatives and Lexicography. The book is the result of an international symposium on e-lexicography, which was held at the University of Valladolid (14-16 June 2010). It features both theoretical reflections and practical work.

In this article we present Termontospider, a wiki crawler that optimally traverses Wikipedia in search of domain-specific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologically-underpinned multilingual terminological databases. The focus is on analyzing the best value for internal links, categories and other metadata to assign weights and search mechanisms in network traversal.

This article summarises a study of terminological variation, i.e. a study of the different terms that are used to express a given unit of understanding in specialised discourse. For instance, the terms 'invasive alien species', 'invasive exotics' or 'pest organisms' are all used to designate a specific alien species that disrupts native fauna and flora. One reason for the growing research interest in terminological variation is that such studies fuel the ongoing discussions on the nature of terms (Temmerman 2000). Another reason is that in many areas of specialised communication (e.g. technical writing, translation, business communication), terminological variation is often felt as a problem that needs to be "solved". The aim of the project is to examine how translators of specialised texts deal with terminological variation. Several questions will be raised such as whether specialised translations tend to contain less terminological variants or whether they tend to mirror the patterns of variation in the original texts. The article will focus on the method that was worked out to identify terms in the source texts, cluster the terminological variants and retrieve the translation equivalents from the target texts

The purpose of this document is to describe the conceptual design of the termbase and software in the OSCB multilingual terminology WP. We will first discuss the conceptual design of the OSCB multilingual termbase. We will provide a list of all the data categories and show how they are used to structure terminological information. Next, we will discuss the different components of the termontography workbench, a workbench supporting the termontography method (Temmerman and Kerremans 2003; Kerremans et al. 2005) that will be used for compiling the OSCB termbase.

The objective of the OSCB multilingual terminology work package (WP4) is to compile a database of English, Dutch and French terminology related to the domains that will be covered in the OSCB project (e.g. cultural events). The development process of this termbase will be based on the methodological guidelines set forth in the termontography methodological framework (Temmerman & Kerremans 2003; Kerremans e.a. 2005; Temmerman e.a. 2006). Termontography is an application- or task-oriented approach for terminology description. An important view in this approach is that a knowledge analysis phase should ideally precede the methodological steps which are generally conceived as the starting-points in terminography: i.e. the compilation of a domain-specific corpus of texts (Moreno & Perez 2001) and the understanding and analysis of the categories that occur in a certain domain (Meyer e.a. 1997. This view results from the fact that terminological databases need to represent in natural language those items of knowledge or 'units of understanding' (Temmerman 2000) which are considered relevant to specific purposes, applications or groups of users (Aussenac-Gilles e.a. 2002). The methodology is supported by a suite of software tools (i.e. the Termontography Workbench) that allows specialised texts (irrespective of the language) to be analysed manually following the methodological guidelines (De Baer e.a. 2008). This report will focus on recent trends in the (semi-)automatic compilation of multilingual termbases. Two areas will be explored: * Computational terminology, a research area which is gaining more interest due to its importance for terminology work or in areas such as knowledge management, text mining, information retrieval and extraction or ontology development (Bourigault e.a. 2001). It will be examined to what extent the OSCB multilingual termbase can benefit from recent trends in the area of computational terminology. The chapter will focus on recent work related to automatic extraction of terminological data (e.g. terms, semantic relations, definitions, translations) and, in this way, will present possibilities for (semi-)automatically developing the OSCB termbase. * Open linguistics, a recently coined term to denote a subdiscipline of linguistics that is devoted to research on different aspects of open linguistic data. More information on this new research area can be found on: http://linguistics.okfn.org/. As the multilingual termbase is going to be part of the OSCB framework for Linked Data, it will also be examined how it can benefit from or relate to important initiatives (e.g. projects, software tools, language resources, guidelines) with respect to open linguistic data. This chapter will provide a summary of some of these important initiatives in the area of open linguistics. On the basis of a description of state-of-the-art work in computational terminology and open linguistics, the following issues will be addressed in this report: * What recent trends can be observed with respectto the automatic extraction of terminological data and (how) can these trends contribute to a further refinement of the termontography method (Temmerman & Kerremans 2003; Kerremans e.a. 2005; Temmerman e.a. 2006) and tools (De Baer e.a. 2008)? * How can the OSCB project - and more specifically the multilingual terminology work package - benefit from initiatives related to open linguistic data? For instance, what open linguistic data could be deployed for the compilation the OSCB termbase? In what formats should we publish the multilingual terminological data? What methods could be used for linking or aligning terminological data? Etc. We will first discuss some important shifts in the field of terminology and explain how these shifts have influenced the way many multilingual termbases are used and compiled today. Next, we will explore some of the recent methods in automatic extraction of terminological data. Then, we will summarise some important initiatives with respect to open linguistic data, such as available language resources, exchange formats or methods for linking terminological data. Finally, we will summarise the most important trends and discuss how they can be adopted in the OSCB project for the compilation of the multilingual termbase.

In recent years, several terminology projects have focussed on terminological variation (e.g. Freixa 2002). One reason for the growing interest is that such projects fuel the ongoing discussions on the nature of terms (e.g. Temmerman 2000). Another reason is that in many areas of specialised communication (e.g. technical writing, translation, business communication), terminological variation is often felt as a problem that needs to be "solved". This presentation summarises an ongoing project about terminological variation in specialised translation. The aim of the project is to examine how translators of specialised texts deal with terminological variation. Several questions will be raised such as whether specialised translations tend to contain less terminological variants or whether they tend to mirror the patterns of variation in the original texts. It has been argued in previous studies (e.g. Resche 2004) that ignoring variation in specialised translation may sometimes be problematic: "translators may actually over-standardize, creating consistency in places where the use of variants was deliberate and well reasoned" (Bowker and Hawkins 2006:80). A comparative analysis of the patterns of variation will be carried out on a multilingual (Dutch, English, French) corpus of specialised texts and their translations. The corpus contains a variety of texts related to different subject fields (e.g. biology, economy) and reflecting different levels of specialisation. The method will involve an analysis of lexical chains, i.e. the "cohesive ties [in a text] sharing the same referent" (Rogers 2008:104). In this presentation, I will focus on the method of analysis and discuss some preliminary results. References Bowker, L. and Hawkins, S. (2006). "Variation in the organization of medical terms: Exploring some motivations for term choice," Terminology 12(1): 79-110. Freixa, J. (2002). La variació terminològica. Barcelona, Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Sèrie Tesis, 3. Resche, C. (2004). "Equivocal Economic Terms or Terminology Revisited," Meta 44(4): 343-359. Rogers, M. (2008). "Terminological Equivalence: Probability and Consistency," MUTRA 2: 101-108. Temmerman, R. (2000). Towards New Ways of Terminology Description. The Sociocognitive Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

After providing a brief survey of research related to the study of variation in LSP (section 1), we intend to outline in this article the sociocognitive views on terminology, situatedness and variation (section 2). In section 3, we will reflect on the importance of insights about situatedness and variation as well as the impact of these insights on the practical task of compiling and managing terminological resources. Our insights were gathered from real-life terminology projects, as will be demonstrated in section 4. We will focus on PoCeHRMOM , a terminology project about developing a resource of competency-based occupation profiles for Flemish small and medium-sized enterprises, and explain how different types of variation in occupation profiles are managed and represented, using our own terminology management practices and tools. In particular, we will outline our methodology, called Termontography and describe the Multilingual Categorisation Framework Editor (MCFE). This software tool allows users to create and visualise domain knowledge as well as to structure terminology according to a categorisation framework.

Multilingual terminological resources in Semantic Web Technology

In this article we describe our reasons for preferring an application programming interface (API) over a relational- or XML-database, to construct terminological- and lexicographical resources. We will explain how our research, aimed at developing terminological- and lexicographical databases that could be used and supported by a broad range of specialised software tools, has led to this opinion. This research has spanned several projects for which we developed, different multilingual ontological-underpinned lexical resources, and specialised software tools to support these resource-development tasks. Because various applications should be able to use the resulting lexical resources, we wanted to structure the resources by means of an application ontology. Application ontologies can be interpreted by different applications and may thus facilitate the integration of the software tools. At first we tried to use the Protégé ontology editor API [2] to store the required lexical information. This API facilitated the development of an ontological structure and we could easily develop software tools based on it. However, it proved difficult (if not impossible) to store all the lexical information by simply using this ontological structure. We therefore expanded the ontological structure to include the required lexical information. The resulting structure we call a Categorisation Framework (CF) and we use it to categorise lexical information. We shall explain how the CF can be used to structure and store all kinds of lexical information. Due to the multilingual- and specialised nature of the resources it was necessary for different domain experts to collaborate, while constructing the domain ontologies and gathering the lexical information. By implementing an XML-format to represent the CF, we ensured that the resources could be developed and exchanged in a modular way. The XML-format made it also possible to include existing structured information, e.g. databases, by converting them into this XML-format. Although the XML-format proved to be extremely useful during the development of the lexical resources, it became clear that the size and complexity of the total resources required a more efficient database-format. We therefore implemented the CF also as a relational database using JavaDB. To handle the CF and use the information in our software tools, we developed a Java API. Our software tools for corpus compilation, linguistic ontology development and terminology management all use this API. Using the CF API makes it easy to manage the CF, and to store the information in both XML and relational database format. The main advantage of the CF API is that it facilitates the development of specialised software tools for lexicography, terminography, and linguistic ontology engineering. Using the CF API, different software tools can process the appropriate CF information. New projects may simply reuse information from previous projects, while the flexible and customisable nature of the CF enables the addition of extra lexical information. In chapter 1 we will describe the Categorisation Framework and how it can be used to structure and store all kinds of lexical and ontological information. In chapter 2, we will discuss the current use and advantages of the CF API.

In this article we describe the Categorisation Framework Editor (CFE), a software tool to construct ontologically underpinned terminological resources. The CFE supports the Termontography-methodology which is a multidisplinary approach in which theories and methods for multilingual terminological analysis of sociocognitive theory (Temmerman, 2000) are combined with methods and guidelines for ontology engineering. A clear distinction is made between conceptual modelling at a language-independent level and a language-specific analysis of units of understanding. The data structure used to store the terminological information we call a Categorisation Framework and this structure will also be described in this article. Since the CFE was developed during the PoCeHRMOM-project, we will illustrate the use of the CFE with examples from this project. During the PoCeHRMOM-project an online platform, named Profile Compiler, was developed on which companies and organisations could create job profiles. A job profile typically contains a list of required competencies and qualifications, together with a list of tasks a job candidate should be able to carry out. The CFE was used to develop the ontologically structured multilingual (EN, FR, NL) terminological database for the project.

In industries, ontologies and the modern semantic technologies are offered as the potential solutions to support mutual understanding in the collaborative settings. Currently, organizations are unable to cope with collaborative decision making in the Human Resource Management (HRM) domain. Mastering competencies and sharing decision rules is a complex yet important issue. Therefore, we developed an online multilingual knowledge platform, the PROFILE COMPILER, which allows small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to retrieve and personalize existing competence profiles, design and share their decision rules (e.g. recruitment rules). Semantic Decision Tables (SDT) is mainly used (1) to elaborate concepts of the competency ontologies within a decision group, (2) to gather semantic grounded decision rules and (3) to provide tabular reports to the users. In this paper, we focus on the underlying system design, the knowledge extraction methodologies, SDT integration and the result: the PROFILE COMPILER web applications. Ontologies, Terminology and SDT are at the heart of the design.

Terminology projects carried out before by the Centrum voor Vaktaal en Communicatie (CVC) in different domains such as fraud, HRM, mecatronics and senior care raised the awareness concerning the added value of terminological dictionaries in which several aspects of variation are described, as supportive resources for multilingual communication. Whereas in the past the main emphasis in special language studies was on standardisation, in recent years more attention has been devoted in descriptive terminology approaches to the study of variation in terminology and on how to approach, understand and describe it. Many of these studies started from a monolingual perspective, whereby terminological variation is studied at different linguistic levels (morphological, syntactic, semantic) within the same language. Given the relevance for multilingual communication, this PhD project tries to study terminological variation from a contrastive, multilingual and multidimensional perspective. Multidimensional implies that several parameters or dimensions (e.g. language, type of discourse, type of domain, etc.) have an impact on terminological variation. During an analysis of English, Dutch and French domain-specific texts, these parameters will be studied in more depth. A contrastive approach implies an analysis of the possible meaning differences between terms and variants in the three languages, taking into account the verbal, situational and cognitive contexts that give shape to the meaning of terms.

We present a research project which aims at compiling domain-specific translation dictionaries based on ontological models. Research has shown that traditional translation dictionaries provide insufficient information in order to solve cross-linguistic and cross-cultural termino-logical problems. Multilingual terminological resources for translators must therefore widen their scope towards knowledge representation. We illustrate this point by comparing the in-formation found in traditional translation dictionaries to the information found in Dictionnaire Analytique de la Distribution. Analytical Dictionary of Retailing, a dictionary based on insights from knowledge modelling and management. Next, we intend to discuss how cross-linguistic and cross-cultural information is dealt with in Termontography, a terminological approach in which theory and practices of sociocognitive terminology description (Temmerman 2000) are combined with methods in application-oriented, text-based ontology development (Zhao et al.2004). In particular, we will demon-strate with examples from the PoCeHRMOM project, how the MCFE application can account for several types of terminological variation (cf. Bowker and Hawkinson 2006; Daille et al. 1996; Dubuc 1997). The MCFE is a tool developed by CVC Brussels to set up multilingual categorisation frameworks (Kerremans 2004).

In Europe, communication between legal experts is often hampered as a result of multilingual and cultural differences. For example, legal concepts either have different implementations in national laws or only exist in some regional legislations. Consequently, a one-to-one semantic equivalence between legal terminology in different languages is rare. To address these problems, and support and facilitate the communication between welfare professionals in a European context, we set up a small pilot project. Together with legal specialists in the area of senior care, and in line with the Termontography method, we developed a knowledge base covering trilingual terminology (English, French and Dutch), centred around the concepts CareHome, NursingHome and ShortStay, in four different legal settings (UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands). In this paper, we discuss the functionalities and the underlying model of the data-mining tool KBExplorer, developed for browsing through the resulting terminological and legalinformation resource.

In this article, we demonstrate how the quality of translation dictionaries for special language purposes can be improved based on termontological support. We reflect on the importance of different types of contexts in the translation process and discuss the need for a new type of translation dictionary reflecting these different contexts.

This document discusses the possible contribution of CVC to the OASIS project financed by the Belgian Post Group.

In this paper we will first discuss the principles of traditional terminology theory (section 1). Then we will go into the principles of sociocognitive terminology theory (section 2). Finally we will introduce the Termontography method, illustrated by the FF POIROT and OOV projects (section 3).

Competency management has taken a central position in the HRM policies of large companies. The urge to maintain an overview of the individual competencies (i.e. knowledge, skills and attitudes of employees) as well as core competencies (i.e. the things a company is experienced in) results amongst others from the need to react on market shifts. Moreover, competency management leads to better job planning, objective criteria for the evaluation of personnel, a higher interest in the learning opportunities within the company, a better insight in the structure of the organisation, etc. As a result, it could be argued that competencies are the main vocabulary of large companies to communicate e.g. expertise (knowledge and skills). The use of this vocabulary in combination with new emerging technologies leads to many innovative applications in the field of e-HRM. In this article, we discuss the problems that may arise when competency-based job profiles are automatically exchanged in a semantic web environment. Competencies may be denoted by different terms while similar terms may have different meanings. We will illustrate with examples from the PoCeHRMOM project how we attempt to overcome these problems of terminological variation by adopting our own terminology management practices and tools.

This document describes the possible contribution of CVC to the ADIIKS project proposal.

Within the framework of the FF POIROT project, the Centrum voor Vaktaal en Communicatie has worked out the Termontography methodology for developing (multilingual) ontology-based terminological resources. In an ontology-based terminological resource, the terminology extracted from texts is structured according to a predefined set of categories and relations, which scope both the information gathering as well as the search phases in the Termontography method (Kerremans et al. 2003). In an article presented at the EURALEX international conference, CVC noted that in the commercial terminology management systems we know of, the organization of multilingual terminology in a network of categories (also known as categorisation framework) is not possible (Kerremans et al. 2004). Although these systems are concept-oriented (i.e. multilingual terminology denoting the same concept is placed in the same terminological record), they do not allow users to specify how the concepts are related within a domain of interest. Therefore, a terminological resource developed in these systems hardly has an ontological foundation. In Kerremans et al. (2004) CVC wrote down some important user requirements for a workbench supporting the development of (multilingual) ontology-based terminological resources. A programmer was recruited in the last year of the FF POIROT project to develop a software environment that meets these requirements. As this development phase is still in progress, this report will discuss the intermediate results and present the work achieved so far. This document is structured as follows: section 2 summarises our user requirements. Section 3 covers the technical description of the software workbench. In particular, we focus on the implementation of the Termontography workbench that allows users to develop ontology-based terminological resources (section 3.1). In section 3.2, we introduce the KBExplorer tool that allows us to query and search through such resources. Section 4 states the Intellectual Property Rights. In section 5, we conclude.

Due to its huge volume of information and wide-spread access, the Internet becomes an attractive medium for fraudsters to reach a large number of potential victims in a short time. Moreover, its size and dynamics make it difficult to put the web contents under close legal surveillance. Consequently, most frauds on the Internet are discovered by accident and a large number of them go undetected (Davia, 2000). One of the aims of the FF POIROT project (IST-2001-38248), a European research project in the fifth framework is to develop formal and shareable knowledge repositories (i.e. ontologies) and terminological resources for applications detecting and intercepting e.g. securities fraud on the Internet. Securities fraud refers to the selling of overpriced or worthless shares, or other financial instuments to the general public (Zhao et al., 2004c). Within the framework of this research project, two approaches have been worked out to support the development of ontological repositories, on the one hand, and terminology bases, on the other hand. The integration of these resources in fraud detection systems, motivates the application-oriented views in both these methodologies: AKEM (for knowledge engineering) and Termontography (for terminology engineering). This article wants to show how the methods of AKEM and Termontography are interacting in the development process towards an innovative and technological solution for detecting and intercepting securities fraud. The development tracks will be outlined in section 2. Next, we will discuss the Termontography (section 3) and AKEM (section 4) approaches and explain how both approaches interact within the scope of the problem and knowledge space (section 5). In particular, we will show how principles of the AKEM methodology are integrated in Termontography and, vice versa, how Termontography contributes to the development of the formal and shareable knowledge repository. Finally, in section 6 we conclude.

The VAT topical ontology is a formal knowledge resource developed by CVC and VUB. The content of the VAT topical ontology roughly coincides with the information presented on the website of the European Taxation and Customs Union . The structure of this website has determined the general scope of the ontology whereas information about the categories or topics discussed in the webpages are constructed by applying the AKEM knowledge engineering approach. AKEM is based on the DOGMA modelling approach (Jarrar and Meersman 2002) and primarily emphasises a bottom-up (i.e. text-driven) application-oriented view in ontology modelling (Zhao 2004; Zhao et al. 2004). To some extent, the methodology was also found useful for the development of a domain-specific ontology which surpasses the boundaries of a univocal application-oriented view, provided that the ontology is seen as a knowledge repository serving more than one application scenario in the domain of interest. This report not only discusses the VAT topical ontology created in the FF POIROT project. It also focuses on Termontography, the approach in terminography which has been worked out by CVC Brussels (Kerremans et al. 2003; Kerremans 2004; Temmerman and Kerremans 2003).

This document discusses a number of experiments that were set up in order to calculate and compare the number of terms and roles extracted by CVC and STAR Lab VUB from the European Sixth Directive on VAT (77/388/EEC). Next we present the Applied Knowledge Engineering Methodology (AKEM) in which both terminographers and ontology engineers collaborate in the development process of multilingual ontologies. The report shows how CVC has been able to isolate from texts certain knowledge patterns that are important in this development process.

This document discusses the content of the VAT topical ontology created in the FF POIROT project. The ontology will provide the concepts and relations used in several VAT applications for document management, monitoring, question-answering, etc. The scope of the VAT ontology is to a large extent based on the structure of the website of the Taxation and Customs Union of the European Union.

This document summarises the contribution of CVC to WP8 in the FF POIROT project.