Multilingual Thesauri : To express one and same concept from various cultures and different languages.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problems in multilingual thesauri, with a focus on the problem of conceptual equivalence between different languages. This study compares the problems and solutions that have been carried out in the Eurovoc multilingual thesaurus with the ISO 5964 ISO 5964 is a guideline for establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. The Swedish descriptors in the subject area "education and communication", from Eurovoc have been observed and compared with the guidelines recommendations. The results show that, the majority of the investigated Swedish descriptors do not present any problem. Most of the terms that are used as descriptors are found in dictionaries and glossaries or appear with high frequency in Swedish websites. But there still are some problems caused by non-equivalence. Two descriptors have a non-satisfying solution. Those two situations differ somewhat from the situations described in the guidelines. Also a number of the descriptors that were not found in dictionaries have a less natural character, even though they are understandable and should work for the purpose of information retrieval. In general the recommendations in the guideline are followed by the creators of Eurovoc, although there are some exceptions.Uppsatsnivå: