III. Translation vs. Equivalency Work
ISO 5964 recognizes three approaches to the construction of multilingual thesauri:
- ab initio construction, i. e. , the establishment of a new multilingual vocabulary without direct reference to the terms or structure of an existing thesaurus;
- translation of an existing monolingual thesaurus;
- reconciliation and merging of existing thesauri in two or more working languages.
These approaches express decreasing levels of complexity and expense of development costs. The equivalency work described in the present document most closely matches the third method named above. Translation of an existing vocabulary into a desired language is a very different process. In all three methods, the languages of the resulting multilingual vocabulary must have equal status to the source language or languages.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture first examined translation of an existing vocabulary list in the 1980s as a feasibility study for multilingual thesaurus construction, using terms taken from the Glossarium Artis[6]. The study team, which included a linguistics expert as well as subject experts, used AAT term sheets to construct parallel term sheets in French. The process was found to successfully overcome conceptual differences between the languages, but it was recommended that the established French terms undergo further art-historical and linguistic analysis before being accepted as true equivalents. This experiment highlighted the difficulties of translation, pointing to the fact that significant research time to establish the French terms was necessary, making the process lengthy and expensive.
By the early 1990s the AAT staff working on the project developed a system of comparing two equivalent vocabulary lists with the Inventaire général staff who wished to provide English terms for the French terms in their architecture thesaurus. This system, which is the focus of the guidelines in this document, has been further elaborated in work with other languages and has proved to be more feasible than straight translation.
At the time the present compendium of practice was being prepared, a project to translate the AAT into Dutch was being carried out by a Dutch team from the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) and the Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg. This project envisions an initial translation of the entire AAT, followed by reviews of the translated terms by teams of subject experts. The choice of this method may be due to the lack of an existing vocabulary in the target language to serve as the basis for comparison and equivalency work.
6. Huber, Rudolf and Renate Rieth, eds. Glossarium Artis: Wörterbuch zur Kunst. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977-1988.
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