New perspectives in developing multilingual thesauri

This paper will touch upon the issue of meaning representation and organization in multilingual thesauri. More than ever before, these tools have the chance to play a significant role in facilitating access to information in the globally interrelated world, but have to cope with the issue of how the diversity of languages is related to the diversity of cultures, of ways of living and conceptualizing reality. In order to fulfil their function of representing a domain cross-linguistically, and thus cross-culturally, the way in which thesauri are conceived matters significantly. This paper analyses two different approaches on how to develop a multilingual thesaurus: one based on a symmetrical semantic structuring of the terms and a second one on a non-symmetrical organization. The first approach implies a high level of compatibility between languages, defining an equivalent term for each descriptor of the thesaurus as well as an identical semantic arrangement, in all the languages of the tool, as opposed to the second one which does not presuppose this equivalence in all cases and where semantic structures are allowed to differ. The implications that these different approaches have on the possibility to design thesauri with an authentic multilingual/multicultural character are also evaluated.