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IATE ☍ (Interactive Terminology for Europe) is a dynamic database designed to support the multilingual drafting of EU texts, and legal texts in particular. It aims to provide relevant, reliable, easily accessible data with distinct added value compared with other sources of lexical information (e.g. translation memories, the internet, electronic archives).
It was created in 2004 by merging the terminology databases of various EU institutions and bodies, which partly explains the large number of duplicated entries (many concepts are covered by several entries, rather than by a single entry). The interinstitutional IATE Clean-up Task Force, set up in 2015, is managing the task of analysing and cleaning up the data in order to consolidate duplicated entries into a single entry. This explains why the number of entries and terms is decreasing, since more duplicate or poor-quality content is being deleted than new content created.
This work will ensure that IATE contains only verified, reliable and multilingual terminology provided by EU institutions, bodies and agencies across the various subject areas they cover.
Since IATE is publicly available, it gives language professionals, academics, national experts, public administrations, policy advisers, private-sector companies and the general public access to verified terminology. Through it, EU terminologists can make a greater contribution to the EU policy of encouraging multilingualism and making EU legislation more transparent for citizens.
Being truly interactive, IATE also allows external users to send feedback. Read more about the feedback mechanism.
General principles of IATE data:
Read more about the user groups and access rights.
USEFULNESS FOR THE DRAFTING OF TEXTS
IATE’s usefulness for multilingual drafting, translation and interpretation in the EU sphere is the prime concern of the terminologists feeding it. It is not a general-language dictionary, so ordinary words and expressions are avoided. Phrases are entered only if their use is restricted to a specific context (e.g. standard formulas in EU legislation).
CREDIBILITY OF ENTRIES
We try to ensure that IATE entries give you as much information as possible to allow you to judge whether the proposed term is appropriate and credible. We usually provide references to the sources we have consulted.
MULTILINGUALISM
We try to ensure that IATE promotes multilingualism by consolidating and merging any monolingual or bilingual entries for the same concept and by adding as many languages as possible to new entries.
ONE CONCEPT, ONE ENTRY
The IATE data structure is based on a concept-oriented approach, which means that each entry corresponds to one concept (terms are grouped by their meaning), and each concept should ideally be covered by a single entry.
Each IATE entry has three different levels:
- Language-Independent Level (LIL)
- Language Level (LL)
- Term Level (TL)
Read more about the entry structure.
 The suggested citation style for an IATE entry is as follows:European Union, ‘ordinary legislative procedure’, IATE terminology database, accessed on 20 November 2020, https://iate.europa.eu/entry/result/930970 The URL should be the permalink displayed at the bottom left of the full entry display. |
USER GROUPS AND ACCESS RIGHTS
Check below which data is available to the various IATE users:
| User group | IATE data available | Fields available | Metadata available |
|---|---|---|---|
| EXTERNAL USER | All data except: -confidential entries, languages and terms -pre-IATE languages and terms -non-validated languages and terms -raw entries -only limited data in non-EU languages | All fields in an entry except: -LIL: Management -LIL: Related project(s) -LL: Related material, Management -TL: Management | All metadata in an entry except: -protection -non-public collections -validation status (only validated data displayed to external users) |
| INTERNAL USER | All data | All fields | All metadata |