Developing an Online Kazakh-English-Russian Thesaurus of ‎Industry-Specific Terminology

Abstract

Industry-specific translation is one of the rapidly developing and highly demanded sectors in Kazakhstan. This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological issues of compiling a controlled multilingual vocabulary or thesaurus for the purposes of industry-specific translation. The proposed multilingual thesaurus addresses the gap of existing online dictionaries with the lack of ability to translate directly from English into Kazakh, and provides relevant equivalents for mining and metal terms in three languages: Kazakh, English, and Russian. The study is interdisciplinary and combines methods of linguistic analysis, machine learning, ontological and corpus-based studies that allow an exhaustive analysis, generalization, comparison, systematization, classification, and formalization of the mining industry terminology through a multilingual parallel corpus based on the Zthez international technical platform. The controlled multilingual thesaurus is designed to promote intercultural communication of professionals and translators in the mining industry. Besides it enables the foundation to be built for a Kazakh language corpus, unifying and systematizing Kazakh industry-specific terms in a multilingual way.

Keywords

• controlled vocabulary
• terminology
• interoperable thesaurus
• industry-specific translation
• multilingual thesaurus