Turning a termbase into an integrated knowledge-base: the Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety terminology website

This paper aims at describing an innovative approach to terminological practice based on the definition of a termbase structure and contents according to the characteristics of the subject field under examination, the needs of its prospective users, as well as on the use of corpora as integrated parts of the termbase itself. It draws on a project for the realisation of a multilingual terminological website for the domain of Health and Safety at Work law, which was developed at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators, University of Bologna, starting from two four-year degree dissertations. We will therefore first analyse some of the peculiarities of the domain of Health and Safety at Work (HSW) and of the corresponding specialised language (LSP) which strongly influenced the choice of both the corpus on which to ground term extraction and analysis and of the information to be included in the termbase. We will then present the decisions made about the contents of the termbase, focusing on the features which led us to describe the final product as a knowledge base.