Integrated bilingual specialist dictionaries- the LexTerm initiative

Dictionary publishers dealing with millions of bilingual and multilingual data have to find answers to the following two main issues: accommodating the needs of a still large dictionary users community for traditional printed or electronic dictionaries and meeting the need of the professional users beyond Machine Readable Dictionaries on CD-ROM or Online. For this purpose the German specialist dictionary publisher, Langenscheidt Fachverlag (LFG) proposes a global solution together with experts from the University of Rennes 2 and well-known Translation Memory providers. LexTerm is a methodology for reusing lexicographical data and building a bridge between dictionaries and terminology. 1. Meeting the actual professional translators ' needs The specialised translation volumes are steadily increasing especially in the technical, economical and juridical fields. In the same time, companies and institutions which are the main order-givers have to cut down costs and in many cases the budget for language communication undergoes a very strict control. As a consequence, a lot of easy and repetitive translation tasks are achieved by non-professionals or translation software and professional translators are given the most difficult texts to translate for which they have to charge at a reasonable rate in order to keep getting orders. In this context, they have to optimise their work