EuroDicAutom

Eurodicautom is the European Commissions multilingual term bank. When it was first set up in 1973 the development team drew upon the know-how and lexicographic material of two other tools available to Commission translators: Dicautom, a phrasal automatic dictionary launched in 1964, and Euroterm, a translation dictionary developed in 1962-68. The four original languages of Eurodicautom were Dutch, French, German and Italian, to which Danish and English were added in 1973, Greek in 1981, Portuguese and Spanish in 1986, and Finnish and Swedish in 1995. Latin is also present.

Although originally developed to meet the needs of in-house translators, Eurodicautom soon became useful to other Commission staff and was later adopted by linguists in other European institutions. Today it is an invaluable tool for translators, interpreters, terminologists and other linguists worldwide over the Internet, where it records a daily average of 120.000 enquiries.

A radical overhaul of the underlying system, involving considerable upgrading of software and hardware capacity, and the migration of the data to two different platforms (Oracle for production, Fulcrum for distribution), has brought a great improvement in the management and retrieval of information. The new system will also allow seamless input of new languages.

Eurodicautom covers a broad spectrum of human knowledge, but is particularly rich in technical and specialized terminology (agriculture, telecommunications, transport, legislation, finance) related to EU policy. New data are added constantly by a team of Commission terminologists, supported by technical staff, using a special program (Edictor) to process terminology obtained from Commission terminologists, translators, linguists from other European and international institutions, research centres, publishers, private experts, etc.

Entries are classified into 48 subject fields (ranging from medicine to public administration). A typical entry contains the term itself and its synonyms, together with definitions, explanatory notes, references, etc. At present the term bank contains about five and a half million entries (terms and abbreviations), subdivided into more than 800 collections.

Users can define and store their profile (search parameters) for future sessions. Feedback from users is welcome and there is a comprehensive online user guide.

The New Eurodicautom Data migration what for?

Eurodicautom has been running on a Siemens machine since 1980 (ages in computer terms!). The Commission, and more particularly the Data Centre, have envisaged to give up old technology in order to keep up with progress made in computer science. A state-of-the-art technology will enable us to make a step towards a more accurate methodology and to process the new PECO languages. Management will also be improved with easier, semi-automatic cleanup and harmonization routines. As a result, updates will be more regular and frequent.

What is a Termbase?

A termbase is a database containing terminology and related information. Most termbases are multilingual and contain terminology data in a range of different languages.