Multicultural Thesaurus Construction Case Homemakers in Finnish and British Discourses

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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_at_abo.fi

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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.

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

• Translatability of British-English social science
  index terms into Finnish language
• Equivalence

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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)

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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)

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Homemakers - some empirical and methodological
findings

• Co-word analysis
• Focused interview
• Word associations

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Conclusions general challenges 1/2

• false friends and well-known strangers
• descriptive vs. politically correct

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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

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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)

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Conclusions methodological benefits

• replication, complementarity, validity
• relevance equivalence
• context equivalence