A Second Life for TIIARA: From Bilingual to Multilingual!
Résumé
Multilingual controlled vocabularies are rare and often very limited in the choice of languages offered. TIIARA (Taxonomy for Image Indexing and RetrievAl) is a bilingual taxonomy developed for image indexing and retrieval. This controlled vocabulary offers indexers and image searchers innovative and coherent access points for ordinary images. The preliminary steps of the elaboration of the bilingual structure are presented. For its
initial development, TIIARA included only two languages, French and English. As a logical follow-up, TIIARA was translated into eight languages—Arabic, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, German, Hindi and Russian—in order to increase its international scope. This paper briefly describes the different stages of the development of the bilingual structure. The processes used in the translations are subsequently presented, as well as the main difficulties encountered by the translators. Adding more languages in TIIARA constitutes an added value for a controlled vocabulary meant to be used by image searchers, who are often limited by their lack of knowledge of multiple languages.