ABSTRACT
Term banks The designation ' terminological data bank' , or its more popular reduced form ' term bank' broadly applies to any system which stores specialized vocabularies in electronic form.
Term banks evolved from printed technical dictionaries and have been closely linked with translation since their inception in the mid1 960s and early 1970s. In specialized transla tion, it is well known that the search for interlingual equivalents is a time-consuming activity , occupying in some cases up to 60 per cent of total translator time. Early term banks included LEXIS of the German Bundes sprachenamt (Federal Office of Languages ) , TEAM, which is owned by Siemens in Munich, EURODICAUTOM of the Commis sion of the European Union in Luxembourg, and TERMIUM of the Canadian Federal Government in Ottawa. These systems were developed by the respective translation depart ment of each organization for the following purposes:
(a) supplementing printed dictionaries by providing up-to-date multilingual term inology
(b) preserving centrally the considerable effort of in-house language specialists, in some cases with the intention of making this work more widely available in printed or electronic form
(c) providing agreed, reliable and unified terminology, thereby ensuring greater terminological consistency in translations which are split up among different translators
T (d) speeding up the translation process by
giving the translator a single efficient tool for retrieving specialized vocabulary.
