GLODOC: A multilingual specialized glossary

Abstract

In modern society, knowledge has an international and multilingual nature. The internationalization process is also reflected in the university environment. In these centres, the development of strategies for multilingual management is promoted with the aim of providing academics and professionals a multilingual training, which is needed throughout life in the immediate environment, in Europe, and worldwide. This knowledge is embodied in scientific documents that are generated daily. This phenomenon was significantly accelerated, on one hand, by the emergence and development of the Internet and, on the other, by the proliferation of specialized and common information sources as well as by the ease of access for researchers, professionals, and users. The constant updating of information requires good selection and translation to enable the understanding of new ideas. A major issue in terms of understanding, at the stage of information selection and retrieval, is that a word can have many possible meanings, but its real meaning is determined by context, and sometimes even more so when a specialized vocabulary is used. GloDoc has been developed in response to this demand by society, with this being a multilingual glossary specializing in the area of communication and documentation, and it is available online. It works with three languages, i.e. pairing Spanish with French or German. In this paper, we describe the objectives of GloDoc and its characteristics.