The Bilingual Web Dictionary on Demand

What do you do when you need to find terminology in a foreign language and available bilingual sources are of no help at all? With the fast-growing complexity in all fields of knowledge and the parallel creation of neologisms needed to distribute the new knowledge, dictionaries and term databases are lagging behind, in particular when you work with two less widely spoken languages. This paper investigates methods and strategies for solving the problem and proposes to lay the grounds for a Bilingual Web Dictionary on Demand. This virtual dictionary is conceived as a number of knowledge-based methodologies allowing users to get across the language barrier using standard search engines and the Web as corpus. The key methodology aims at identifying a target language text containing an equivalent to the source language term using a so-called Cluster Method. Once a candidate term in the target language is identified, it must be validated. Intended users are translators, lexicographers, terminologists who must be bilingual in order to be able to select and adjust clusters.