Adding Chinese to a multilingual terminological resource: A focus on collocations

Although there is a general consensus about the importance of providing access to combinatorial information in specialized dictionaries and term banks, few terminological resources actually record collocations. More importantly, since most terminological resources are concept-based, their structures are not adapted to the description of this linguistic phenomenon. This paper presents a methodology and descriptive model designed to include Chinese collocations in a multilingual resource which focuses on environment terminology. The methodology is corpus-based and the descriptive model (based on Explanatory and Combinatorial Lex-icology (Mel’čuk et al., 1995)) aims to account for the lexico-semantic properties of collocations. We first comment on the characteristics of Chinese collocations that need to be taken into consideration and that can differ from collocations in other languages. Then, we describe the DiCoEnviro, a multilingual terminological resource on the environment, and the methodology devised to compile it. We then focus on collocations and explain how some parts of the methodology for their collection and lexicographical description need to be adapted to Chinese.