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EU terminologists ensure that all terminology work carried out in IATE (including the import of data from external sources) complies with the IATE data guidelines and the standards outlined in this Online Help. This is crucial for maintaining data quality and consistency of EU terminology.
ONE CONCEPT, ONE ENTRY
- Each entry should cover one single concept, consolidating all related data.
- Before creating a new entry, verify that there is not already an entry for the concept to avoid duplicates. We recommend that you check the term or terms and their synonyms in both English and French. Add new terms to existing entries if the concept is already represented in IATE. Also, check for spelling variants.
- Every entry must include sufficient information for the concept to be identified unambiguously.
- A concept can be represented by one or more:
- terms (designating general concepts, e.g. ‘carbon dioxide’, or individual concepts, e.g. ‘United Nations’)
- symbols (designating individual or general concepts, e.g. @).
RELIABILITY AND ACCURACY
- When creating or updating an entry, check the accuracy of the terms and data to be added.
- Add reliable references for each term, and either a clear definition or a quotation showing how the term is used (‘Term in context’), or both.
- The terminologists for a given language act as a filter to ensure that validated terms are reliable.
RELEVANCE AND ADDED VALUE
- Terms must be relevant, i.e. they should correspond to a past, present or potential drafting, translation or interpretation problem in a field relevant to the EU, and not simply to a one-off name or occurrence.
- Add any useful information which is readily available from relevant sources in any language you know sufficiently well (i.e. not just your mother tongue), with a view to facilitating the work of other terminologists. Always provide references to the documents where you found the terms, so that terminologists updating the entry at a later stage can understand the concept.
- Your changes will appear in the validation queue of the terminologists for the language in question. Make sure your updates offer an added value over documentary databases and the internet. Added value may mean, for instance, the addition of a definition or reference, the evaluation of the term, the endorsement of a particular variant, usage warnings, multilingualism, etc.