Praxis and practice of multilingual thesauri

A prerequisite of an international exchange of information is multilingual tools for information retrieval, such as the multilingual thesaurus. There is an ongoing discussion about the construction of, and the guidelines for, multilingual thesauri. In recent years the praxis as defined in ISO 5964 Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri 1985 has been the topic of a scientific discussion. It has been about how equivalence across languages is to be established when it comes to concepts, terms and relational structures. This masters thesis treats the praxis and practice of multilingual thesaurus construction. The purpose is to relate the praxis, defined in ISO 5964, to research and practice. Three multilingual thesauri are analysed to answer the following questions: - How is equivalence established between terms in different thesauri? - How is equivalence established between relations in different thesauri? - Does a selected praxis for and practice of thesaurus construction influence its usefulness? How is usefulness influenced in such cases? The analysis uses concepts from ISO 5964 and the related scientific discussion as the point of departure. The paper establishes that the following perspectives on thesaurus construction should be used concurrently in this analysis: The pragmatic, the cultural, and the relational. The main finding of the paper is that the praxis of ISO 5964 may be combined with modifications in practice. The practical modifications are best understood as belonging to the cultural and relational perspectives. Each type of modification influences the usefulness of the resultant thesaurus in a particular way as outlined in the paper.Uppsatsnivå: