The EU authorities are not only famous for their heaviness and bureaucracy but also for their technical jargon and sometimes completely unintelligible terminology. This does not only cause problems to ordinary EU citizens, but quite often even to translators. From today, however, there is a database called InterActiveTerminology for Europe at your disposal which contains special terminology in 23 languages.
This »InterActive Terminology for Europe»(IATE) database combines the terminology of the several authorities and institutions into one single database. IATE has been used by the translation services of the EU institutions since 2005 and plays an important role in ensuring the quality of the written communication of the EU authorities and institutions.
It has been obvious right from the start of IATE that it would not only benefit the EU translation services but also the general public. The EU institutions provide all EU citizens with free access to IATE, i.e. not only external language experts including freelance translators, researchers and language students, but also national parliaments and administrations which deal with casting EU directives into national law.
Being a multi-lingual terminology database IATE enables users to find the equivalent of certain expression in one or several target languages. Not only does this database currently contain 8.7 million terms, but also 500.000 abbreviations and 100.000 clauses in all 23 official EU languages. 