Structures for a Thesaurus of Technical Terminology

Alexandru Timotin, Florin Teodor Tãnãsescu

1. Introduction

1.1. The experience of electricians in the international standardization of terminology

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is the oldest international institution of standardization. It was created in 1906 from the initiative of electricians for the elaboration of standards and recommendations, according to a voluntary agreement of the member countries (which include all the industrialized countries), that participate by unique and representative National Committees. In 1910 the IEC created the Committee No 1 (TC1)-Terminology, for the elaboration of the International Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV). Since 1925, the Romanian National Committee for the IEC - also called the Romanian Electrotechnical Committee (CER) - has taken part lively to the work of IEC by the studies of Prof. Constantin Budeanu and, after the war, by those of Prof. Remus Rãduleþ, a highly respected scientist in Electrical Engineering, editor of the Romanian Technical Lexicon (1957-1968, 18 volumes with 110,000 terms), past President of IEC (1964-1967) and of its Terminology Committee TC1 (1969-1981). Under his presidency the publication of the third edition of the IEV was started, with concepts defined in three languages (French, English, and Russian) and terms translated in other six, as well as the Multilingual Dictionary of Electricity with a first edition in 1983, with 7,500 terms [1], and a second edition in 1992, with 18,000 terms [2].As a result of the continuous effort made by the IEC experts who have drawn up the IEV chapters, IEV is a highly structured explanatory dictionary. At the same time, this internationally agreed standardization has a remarkably scientific and practical importance, as well as commercial and legal one. As a result of the work division and of the difficulty of unification of the points of view, the international elaboration of the definitions is a slow activity, the IEV chapters being published in long time intervals.

1.2. Elaboration of the thesaurus of IEC terminology

The definitions of a technical dictionary, especially the ones established as a result of an international agreement, remain open to criticism and often express an efficient and pragmatic, but particular, point of view, which reduces their life span. That is why a complementary instrument - less precise but more flexible, richer in correlations and more lasting - better adapted to a simple semantic description of a language is the thesaurus. A thesaurus is an organized group of terms or concepts having a structure described by a set of properties and a set of hierarchical or associative, lexical or semantic relations. A thesaurus includes information concerning the references to sources, i.e. the references to original texts.There are many thesauri with documentary search function, indispensable to the automatic search of references, using key words. They usually include few relations and a large number of references. In contrast, a thesaurus with semantic structure function, that aims at the identification of concepts of a given terminological fund, contains a larger number of relations and less references to sources, chosen for their semantic value.Conscious of the importance of such an instrument for designing the structure of a technical terminology [3], Prof. R. Rãduleþ proposed and initiated the realization of the IEC Thesaurus in 1981. In October 1983, at the IEC General Reunion in Tokyo, Professor Rãduleþ could present the results of the collection of terms (expressions) from the publications edited by IEC until 1981, in the form of two lists (French and English), structured according to the Technical Committees that made the original publications and containing some 120,000 expressions (synonyms included). The Report of the IEC Officers "encouraged Professor Rãduleþ to proceed in his efforts leading to the preparation of a thesaurus". Unfortunately, his unexpected death on 6 February 1984 interrupted his generous and fruitful activity.

105