DELOS - D8.3.1 Feasibility study on multilinguality - MultiLingual information access in TEL

The report describes a feasibility study on how to implement multilingual information access functionality in The European Library (TEL) system. This work has been conducted as part of a collaboration between DELOS, the European Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, funded by the EC Sixth Framework Programme, and the TEL service, fully funded by the participant national libraries, members of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), which aims at providing a co-operative framework for integrated access to the major collections of the European national libraries. This report analyzes the viability of two approaches, potentially to be used in conjunction: 1. using an isolated query translation feature, which, as far as possible, isolates the problem of multilingual searching from the remainder of the system, and 2. using expansion techniques and pseudo translation on bibliographical records, to alleviate problems of translation errors and vocabulary coverage often encountered in systems for multilingual searching