Multilingual Glossary of Controlled Vocabulary Terminology

This Multilingual Glossary of Controlled Vocabulary Terminology includes English, French, Russian, and German terms related to indices, thesauri, taxonomies, and other kinds of controlled vocabularies.

I have compiled the Glossary on the basis of the Standard ГОСТ 7.74-96 “Информационно-поисковые языки. Термины и определения” accepted in Russia and a few former USSR countries. Even though the corresponding ISO standard (5127-6:83) was revised and replaced by ISO 5127:2001, the Glossary could still be of help to librarians, translators, taxonomy specialists, etc. I personally found it to be extremely useful when working on the English-Russian translation of thesaurus software documentation.

The Glossary is available in PDF and in DOC formats to allow you to rearrange and sort the columns depending on your language preferences. Feel free to contact me with any questions regarding the Glossary or its sources.

Multicultural library pamphlets

The State Library of New South Wales welcomes its multicultural community via multilingual pamphlets containing information about core library services. The pamphlets are available in 44 languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Turkish, etc.

Since the information in all pamphlets is virtually identical, you can easily arrange them into bilingual pairs to brush up your library vocabulary in a foreign language or to help you with translation.

The NSW multicultural pamphlets page

Multilingual Glossary database online

The Multilingual Glossary database developed by the State Library of New South Wales (Australia) translates common library phrases from English into one of the 49 languages (wow!). This tool is meant to facilitate communication between library staff and patrons from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Simply select your destination language, pick (or enter) a phrase, and click “Translate”.

Multilingual Glossary

Vocabulaire panlatin de la diffusion et de la distribution du livre

Le Vocabulaire panlatin de la diffusion et de la distribution du livre compte 172 concepts. Il présente, pour chacun de ces concepts, au moins un équivalent dans huit langues différentes : le français, le catalan, l’espagnol, le galicien, l’italien, le portugais, le roumain et, enfin, l’anglais.

Comme le français est la langue de départ de la recherche terminologique, le terme français est présenté en premier; le concept de chaque article est défini en français.

Cet ouvrage a été publié en 2010 par l’Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) et le Réseau panlatin de terminologie (Realiter) et peut être consulté dans le site Web de l’OQLF parmi d’autres lexiques et vocabulaires.

ACRL Multilingual Glossary

The Multilingual Glossary prepared by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in 2008 comprises 85 of the most commonly used terms in academic librarianship in 6 languages: English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and Spanish.

The Glossary is divided into two parts (each in PDF format): 1) the Language Table, which presents a list of these terms in six languages, and 2) the Definitions, which give explanations in English for each of the terms. Personally I don’t see why the definitions had to be separated from the table, but I guess the ACRL people had their reasons.

Here go the URLs to the ACRL website:

• Multilingual Glossary page
• Language Table
• Definitions
• Acknowledgements