As a linguist one of the great developments in the way I work has been the development of online resources in recent years.
These vary from dictionaries to terminological databases and it’s one of the latter that this post is about.
Last week, IATE celebrated its tenth anniversary of being accessible to the public and proudly publicised its entry into double figures.
As can be seen from the screenshot IATE is short for InterActive Terminology for Europe; and it’s a great resource. Searches can be conducted in language pairs from the following languages:
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Danish
- German
- Greek
- English
- Spanish
- Finnish
- French
- Irish
- Croatian
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Latin
- Lithuanian
- Latvian
- Maltese
- Dutch
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Swedish
Searches can also be refined by picking specialist subject areas from, for example, accounting to the wood industry.
It’s a particularly good resource for terminology involving the European institutions, political matters and international relations in general, but is also no slouch when it comes to specific terms for, say, forestry.
History & background
IATE is the EU’s inter-institutional terminology database. IATE has been used in the EU institutions and agencies since summer 2004 for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology. The project partners are:
- European Commission
- European Parliament
- Council of Ministers
- Court of Justice
- Court of Auditors
- Economic & Social Committee
- Committee of the Regions
- European Central Bank
- European Investment Bank
- Translation Centre for the Bodies of the EU
The project was launched in 1999 with the objective of providing a web-based infrastructure for all EU terminology resources, enhancing the availability and standardisation of the information.
IATE incorporates all of the existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single new, highly interactive and accessible inter-institutional database. Legacy databases from EU institutions have been imported into IATE, which now contains some 1.4 million multilingual entries.
The IATE website is administered by the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union in Luxembourg on behalf of the project partners.
Download the database
Having been produced at public expense, the entire database has been opened up to the public can be downloaded, all 1.4 million entries!
Happy birthday, IATE! Here’s to the next 10 years