Benefits of Ontologies to Multilingual Needs

Abstract

The way in which multilingual information is organized and presented, accounts for its usefulness or adequacy for a specific purpose. As globalization becomes more pervasive, people all over the world need to make use of information in different languages in their everyday work. Bilingual or multilingual dictionaries have been, and still are, relevant resources for facing up multilingual issues. However, the multilingual information collected in dictionaries remains insufficient for those people who need to gain a general view of a specific parcel of knowledge in two or more languages. In LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) this issue becomes even more relevant. In the case of translation of specialized texts, specialization on source and target subject matter becomes imperative in order to get a complete understanding of the source text and transfer that knowledge to the target reader. Ontologies may come to solve this knowledge acquisition problem, since they offer a multilingual conceptualization of a specific parcel of knowledge by organizing the information according to the different and various relations between concepts. In this way, translators are able to gain the required domain knowledge, as well as the type of equivalence relations between concepts in the different languages, and their context of use. Thus, pursue of this paper is to give an overview of the benefits of multilingual ontologies to the multilingual information retrieval.