Multilingual Notation

{{noref, date=August 2015
A multilingual notation is a representation in a lexical resource that allows the translation between two or more words.

UML diagrams

For instance, within LMF, a multilingual notation could be as presented in the following diagram, for English / French translation. In this diagram, two intermediate ''SenseAxis'' instances are used in order to represent a near match between ''fleuve'' in French and ''river'' in English. The ''SenseAxis'' instance on the bottom is not linked directly to any English sense because this notion does not exist in English.

A more complex situation is when more than two languages are concerned, as in the following diagram dealing with English, Italian and Spanish.

Number of languages considerations

Within the context of a multilingual database comprising more than two languages, usually the multilingual notations are factorized, in order to save the number of links. In other terms, the multilingual notations are interlingual nodes that are shared among the language descriptions.

But in the specific context of a lexical resource that is a bilingual lexicon, the term ''bilingual link'' is usually preferred.

Other terminology

Let us note that instead of ''translation'' (that has a rather broad meaning), some authors prefer '' equivalence'' between words, with different notions like dynamic and formal equivalences.

Context of use

This term is mainly used in the context of Machine translation and NLP lexicons. The term is not used in the context of translation dictionary that concerns mainly hand-held electronic translators.

See also

*lexical markup framework

External links

workshop on multilingual language resources

Computational linguistics
*
Natural language processing