Tatar Socio-Political Terminology in a Bilingual Thesaurus

Abstract

This paper discusses the general methodology of compiling the Russian-Tatar Socio-Political thesaurus (http://tattez.antat.ru/) which is being developed on the basis of the Russian RuThes thesaurus format (http://www.labinform.ru/pub/ruthes/index.htm) as a hierarchy of concepts. It touches upon some important practical aspects of implementing this project and describes its actual status/. The project is aimed at compiling the whole body of modern Tatar vocabulary related to different aspects of the socio-political sphere, such as the state government, economy, social life, justice, warfare, culture, and religion. The Tatar Thesaurus also comprises some general lexicon branches representing lexical items which can be found in various domain-specific texts. Each concept is linked with a set of language expressions (single words and multiword expressions) referring to it in texts (lexical entries). The Tatar component is based on the list of concepts of RuThes, so the basic structure of the conceptual relations of RuThes is preserved.  In the process of compiling the Tatar Thesaurus, data from the following available Tatar corpora is used:

1. Tatar National Corpus (http://tugantel.tatar/?lang=en);
2. Corpus of Written Tatar (http://www.corpus.tatar/en).

The article also discusses terminological gaps in the Tatar language and explores some differences in semantic relations in Russian and Tatar, which are used to construct terms.

The main challenge of working on this project is concerned with acquiring lexical data and representing Tatar socio-political vocabulary as fully as possible, including a large number of synonymous items in actual use. The location of the Tatar culture at the intersection of Occidental and Oriental civilizations leads to active lexical borrowing both from the Arab-Muslim and from the European cultural areas. Borrowing vocabulary from European languages is carried out through the mediation of the Russian language, where a huge number of words and constructions are taken from. Besides, a significant part of the synonyms are formed with Turkic and Tatar lexical material. Therefore, in modern Tatar, we observe synonyms of various origins (Turkic, Russian, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, and English) that give us a rich lexical material. In addition, the grammar system of Tatar enables the coining of terms of different derivational and syntactic structures. As a result, socio-political terms have variants and synonyms of different lexical composition and structure, all of which are to be fixed in the Tatar Thesaurus.

Currently, the Russian-Tatar Socio-Political thesaurus contains 9,000 concepts and is constantly replenished using special software designed for this project.