Creating online specialized information tools for translating university texts: User profiles and needs

Universities increasingly compete for students across borders producing English-language versions of a wide range of materials, including promotional web pages and brochures, press releases, study guides and regulations. In addition, online transactions between universities and international students increasingly take place in both the national language and English. One way to improve a university’s international profile is to support staff members as well as in-house or external translators with dedicated tools such as bilingual databases for the relevant subject fields and translation dictionaries that take the text (and not just terms) as the central unit of translation. The paper reports on the start of a project aimed a creating an online multilingual dictionaries for drafters and translators of university texts. More specifically, the paper looks at the following: (I) preparation of specific user profiles; (ii) identification of subject fields and selection and preparation of corpus data; (iii) design of a related termbase (iii) term extraction and data retrieval (for collocations and texts); (iv) layout and design of the lexicographic tool.