Multilingual Indexing in an Intercultural Context
Multilingual Indexing in an Intercultural Context

Summary/Abstract: Thanks to the impressive technological progress in communication, library users in the academic environment (teachers, researchers and students) enjoy growing autonomy and flexibility in study, research and documentation, facilitated by access to various information resources and specific search tools, especially in the virtual environment. Autonomy in information retrieval is one of the main goals of university libraries done through developing services and tools. The indexing process in libraries consists of the representation of a document’s content in a summarized form in order to ease information retrieval; the content analysis focuses, among others, on avoiding communication barriers between the public and the sources of information. The process developed from linear indexing (with a hierarchical structure) into coordinated indexing through descriptors or keywords. Inter- and trans-disciplinarity can be manifested in this form, although in this form it is entirely dependent on computing. In the intercultural context of libraries today, where language interference is part of everyday routine, the accessibility to collections depends increasingly on multilingual indexing. This however is not limited to the simple translation of the terms in the catalogue to the languages most used in the library, but also requires the creation of specialized multilingual thesauri. This work illustrates these areas of multilingual indexing proposing some examples of controlled vocabulary, extracted from a micro-thesaurus of the technical field of Mechanisms with descriptors in English, Romanian, German, and French.

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