skeranen0206b

Multicultural Thesaurus Construction – Case ‘Homemakers’ in Finnish and British Discourses : 

Multicultural Thesaurus Construction – Case ‘Homemakers’ in Finnish and British Discourses Susanna Keränen Åbo Akademi University, Department of Social and Political Sciences / Information Studies, Turku, Finland. skeranen@abo.fi

Cultural and linguistic differences in digital storage and retrieval of information: 

Cultural and linguistic differences in digital storage and retrieval of information financed by the Academy of Finland, targeted programme on the Production, Management and Use of Digital Information Resources. Project leader professor Sara von Ungern-Sternberg The aim of the project is to get knowledge about different aspects of language and terminology, which have to be considered when developing documentation languages for international use.

Content management - concept and indexing term equivalence in a multilingual thesaurus : 

Content management - concept and indexing term equivalence in a multilingual thesaurus Translatability of British-English social science index terms into Finnish language Equivalence

Case – Family Roles: 

Case – Family Roles ELSST (European Language Social Science Thesaurus) Family Roles NT Breadwinners Heads of Household Homemakers SN A person, either male or female, whose role is to look after the home and family instead of earning money from employment NT Housewives (UKDA 2003)

Methods and Material: 

Methods and Material Focused interview Simulated indexing situation Co-word analysis Discourse analysis Semantic component analysis Statistics Dictionaries Language usage guides Thesauri Databases Indexers, thesaurus constructors, social scientists (tot. 32)

Homemakers - some empirical and methodological findings: 

Homemakers - some empirical and methodological findings Co-word analysis Focused interview Word associations

Conclusions – general challenges 1/2: 

Conclusions – general challenges 1/2 false friends and well-known strangers descriptive vs. politically correct

Conclusions – general challenges 2/2: 

Conclusions – general challenges 2/2 Multilingual thesaurus could be a gateway open to harmonious coexistence and dialogue between the different languages and discourses. Mystical documentary language

Conclusions - methodological problems: 

Conclusions - methodological problems What you see is not all you get: you should see also what is ”missing” International English, Finnish Finnish Sometimes lilliputian datasets, but giant translation problems Limitations of databases (search systems, indexing)

Conclusions – methodological benefits: 

Conclusions – methodological benefits replication, complementarity, validity relevance equivalence context equivalence