Toward a corpus-based multilingual terminology database for Intercultural Communication

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the methodological aspects of the ICoMuTe project aiming to design a corpus-based multilingual terminology database for Intercultural Communication (ICC). The project seeks to explore how ICC terms relate to each other within six European languages (Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish), how these terms are connected to their scientific and cultural contexts, and how they can be translated across different languages and cultures while preserving meaning. The selected approach is corpus-based, using comparable corpora of ICC handbooks and a parallel corpus of texts produced by the European Parliament dealing with key questions related to ICC. Using text recognition and data mining tools (e.g., Sketch Engine), the most frequent ICC terms per language are extracted and analysed in context. To account for the culturally specific aspects of terms while achieving a high degree of cultural neutrality, a semantic model based on tags has been developed for comparing and linking terms across languages in a neutral manner, but natural language corpus-based definitions are also provided that reflect the cultural load of each term. The main findings suggest that semantic tags are relevant to balance the cultural specificity and neutrality of ICC terms, and that English acts as a reference linguistic and cultural framework for the emergence and development of terms in other languages.