Clavel, G.; Dale, P.; Heiner-Freiling, M.; Kunz, M.; Landry, P.; MacEwan, A.; Naudi, M.; Oddy, P.; Saget, A.: CoBRA+ working group on multilingual subject access : final report (1999)
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- Content
- Backgrund to the study: The question of multilingual access to bibliographic databases affects not only searchers in countries in which several languages are spoken such as Switzerland, but also all those who search material in databases containing material in more than one language, which is the case in the majority of scientific or research databases. he growth of networks means that we can easily access catalogues outside our own immediate circle - in another town, another country, another continent. In doing so we encounter problems concerning not only search interfaces, but also concerning subject access or even author access in another language. In France for example, each document, independently of the language in which it has been written, is indexed using a French-language subject heading language. Thus, in order to search by subject headings for documents written in English or German, held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the researcher from abroad has to master the French language. In theory, the indexer should be able to analyse a document and assign headings in his/her native language, while the user should be able to search in his/her native language. The language of the document itself should have no influence on the language of the subject heading language used for indexing nor on the language used for searching. (Practically speaking of course, there are restrictions, since there is a limit to the number of languages in which subject headings languages could be maintained and thus in which the user may search.) In the example below, we are concerned with three languages: German, French and English. If we can imagine a system in which there are equivalents among subject headings in these three languages, the following scenario may be envisaged: a German-speaking indexer will use German-language subject headings to index all the documents received, regardless of the language in which they are written. The user may search for these documents by entering subject headings in German, but also in French or in English, thanks to the equivalents that have been established, in French or in English without the necessity to know the other languages or the structure of the other SHLs. Ideally, this approach should not be confined to one database, but would allow the different databases to be brought together in virtual system: an English-speaking user in London should be able to search the database of the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt using English-language headings, and retrieving documents which have been indexed using the German subject headings' list.
