Lessons from students: A pilot project to discover guidelines for creating a student-friendly, relation-rich term bank

Since the 1990s, there has been growing interest in two key types of terminological information: terminological relations (including generic-specific and part-whole, as well as various non-hierarchical relations), and terminological contexts. These come together in knowledge-rich contexts (KRCs), which both illustrate terms’ behaviour in texts and reveal important connections between terms and between concepts. Such information has been integrated into prototype resources for translators, technical writers, subject-field specialists and students. As more resources integrating this information are developed, we must evaluate how to present it effectively for key user groups. In this paper, we will report on a small pilot project carried out with translation students translating between English and French. The students translated excerpts of popularized texts on breast cancer, using the CREATerminal (a terminology resource model that includes English and French KRCs describing four terminological relations), and compared the information this resource provided with that on term records in TERMIUM Plus and the Grand dictionnaire terminologique (GDT). We report students’ evaluations of the three resources and attempt to derive some guidelines for developing student-friendly, relationenriched terminology resources.