How To Create A Termbase

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|MLT318- Terminology Management Report |
|Juan Jesús Yborra Golpe (664147) |
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|Group 8 |
|15/01/2012 |
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This is a report on how we elaborated a termbase for aTerminology Management module at Swansea University.

The first step we took was to read the book tilted: Terminology: Theory, methods and applications, by María Teresa Cabré. The book was extremely helpful, as it explained how to build up a professional termbase step by step. Apart from this, we also made use of the PowerPoint presentations we were given in the module.

We were requested todevelop two monolingual termbases (one in English and the other one in Spanish), along with a correspondence record for the terms.

The main problem we had to face was the departure of one of the members of the group, what meant that only two people were making all the work. Luckily, we were told that due to these special circumstances, we did not need to use as many terms as the other groups whenmaking the termbase.

What we first did was choosing the domain we were going to work on. After some discussion and proposals, we eventually choose the Vestibular system as our research domain.

Division of work

Once we reached that point, we decided to carry out a small experiment. My team mate would perform the English term search on her own whereas I would also do the same with the Spanishones.

A couple of days later, we met again to check our results and we were surprised that almost 50% of the terms we had extracted were the same ones although obviously, in different languages.

After that, we decided to divide the work and do it during the holydays when we had more spare time.


Creating the termbase


Documentation

First of all, we reached the conclusion thatcarrying out a good work when documenting ourselves that is, choosing trustable resources to build up the textual corpus, was crucial.

In order to achieve this, we agreed that the best way to find reliable medical journals was through official organisms. As I have been a student at the University of Granada for a few years, I know its electronic library quite well and I know there are manyprestigious journals that can be accessed to.

Thus, we used a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection and entered the electronic library of the University. Once there, we started our search looking for English articles and journals. Then, we used the PubMed database to access the MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) bibliographic database, one of the best for life sciences andbiomedical information. Thanks to it, we found 4-5 extremely useful articles from prestigious journal for our work.

Unfortunately, it got notably harder when having to find Spanish articles as the number of articles about the vestibular system in Spanish is low or at least, not as huge as in English. We also had to change the databases, for the previous ones were for English documents only.Luckily, we found a quite useful journal: Revista de otorrinolaringología y cirugía de cabeza y cuello, hosted in Scielo, (Scientific Electronic Library Online) a trustable bibliographic database supported by the State of Sao Paulo (Brazil) that contained hundreds of scientific journals in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Thanks to this exhaustive research, we gathered a good number (approx....