Brussels, 29/06/2007 (Agence Europe) - The InterActive Terminology for Europe database of EU-related terminology (IATE) officially opened to the general public on Friday to help them translate EU terminology. IATE allows free access to the terminology databases of the individual EU institutions and bodies in a single database containing 8.7 million terms and covering all 23 official EU languages. IATE has been in use by the translation services of the EU institutions since 2005. It includes 500,000 abbreviations and 100,000 expressions.
The thesaurus includes the most recent official languages but does not include as many terms as the previous thesaurus for the older official languages because the new languages' use of this specialised jargon is more recent but the long-term aim is to have a thesaurus of identical size for all official languages, explains the Commission. IATE differs from its predecessors (Eurodicautum, Eurerpe and TIS) in two respects. Firstly, it is interactive and any translator from an EU institution can add terms and update information in the database (such changes and updates and then checked over by the linguistic services before they are finally validated). Secondly, IATE is inter-institutional and its development and maintenance are jointly carried out by the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank, the European Central Bank and the Translation Centre. EU Commissioner for Multilingualism Leonard Orban said at the opening ceremony organised by the European Commission and the Parliament that "the development of IATE is the laudable result of successful interinstitutional co-operation. It also lives up to the expectations of cost-effective use of resources, and shows the EU institutions working for Europe's citizens". One of the Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament, Miguel Ángel Martínez Martínez, said that opening of IATE to the public was a "tangible expression of the institutions' genuine commitment to full multilingualism". IATE database: http: //iate.europa.eu (il)