The Multilingual Vocabulary on Economics. English, Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician is one of the results, on a lexicographical resource, of the project RICOTERM-2. Control terminològic i discursiu per a la recuperació d’informació en àmbits comunicatius especialitzats, mitjançant recursos lingüístics específics i un reelaborador de consultes (HUM2004-05658-C02-00), financed by the Plan Nacional I+D+I from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for the period 2004-2007, coordinated between the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, and in which researchers from the Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea and the Universiteit Antwerpen have also participated.

The main target of the RICOTERM-2 project has been the development of a query reelaborator prototype that allows making simple and monolingual queries into Internet and retrieving answers in the languages chosen by users. Based on query expansion from linguistic knowledge, the prototype also makes complex queries made of lexical variants from each language, frequent on the specific domain of the query. For this prototype version we have worked with textual and lexical resources from Economics in the official languages of Spain: Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician.

Built and updated materials, to be able to efficiently control the query expansion in Economics, are specialized textual corpuses (monographs, reviews and doctoral theses) and press textual corpuses (economic press or daily press supplements on Economics) in each of the languages of the project. All corpuses have been structurally and linguistically processed and annotated. The project has allowed to adapt and to test, in a Social Science domain, the terminological automatic extractors existing for Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician, and it has also allowed starting the construction of a new system for Galician. An enrichment of a general lexical ontology with specific lexical information on Economics has also been carried out.

By using these resources and these extraction and processing tools, multilingual lists of economic terms have been built and validated by consulting published reference dictionaries and terminological vocabularies, which were also used to control part of the lexical variation that has been detected. We would like to give especial thanks to Fundació Elhuyar, Euskalterm (Basque Public Terminology Bank), Servizo de Normalización Lingüística from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and Centre de Terminologia TERMCAT for their collaboration on and for having facilitated us the access to the reference sources.

These extracted and validated lexical lists are very different with respect to the number of entries for each language, and the fusion of all in a unique multilingual list has had low coincidence, due to the fact that textual and terminographical sources are related to really varied branches of Economics (insurance, bank, commerce, stock market, etc.). Due to this, and to guarantee the soundness of a multilingual lexical resource for the reelaborator, we have carried out partial automatic fusions for a three-language combinatory, and the entries for Basque have been added manually. We have obtained a tetralingual resource of 1100 entries with their equivalents.

This multilingual vocabulary, also including English apart from the languages of the RICOTERM-2 project, is born from this process. The number of entries varies depending on the language: 7000 for Spanish and Catalan, 6400 for English, 4000 for Galician and 971 for Basque. The resource includes the 1100 lemmas having the complete series of equivalents in one, two or three languages. Apart from the equivalent information, users can find grammatical information and documented synonyms as variants on each of the languages.

This is a preliminary version, and therefore we are aware of the limitations of this resource, that we expect to improve and complete in a near future. Nevertheless, we think that the HTML edition of this vocabulary will be a useful tool for linguistic mediation tasks done by economists, professors, journalists, translators, editors and students.