Nykyri, Susanna
(2010)
In the present article, based on my dissertation, multilingual thesauri are approached as cultural products and the focus is twofold: On the empirical level the focus is placed on the translatability of certain British-English social science indexing terms into the Finnish language and culture at a concept, a term and an indexing term level. On the theoretical level the focus is placed on the aim of translation and on the concept of equivalence. In accordance with modern communicative and dynamic translation theories the interest is on the human dimension. The study is qualitative. The study uses multiple cases and several data collection and analysis methods aiming at theoretical replication and complementarity. The empirical material and analysis consist of focused interviews (with Finnish and British social scientists, thesaurus constructors and indexers), simulated indexing tasks with Finnish and British indexers, semantic component analysis of dictionary definitions and translations, co-word analysis and datasets retrieved in databases, and discourse analysis of thesauri. As a terminological starting point the topic and case ‘family roles’ is selected. The study shows that the variety of different discourses should be acknowledged, there is a need for operationalisation of new types of multilingual thesauri, and the factors influencing pragmatic indexing term equivalence should be discussed more precisely than is traditionally done.