Integrating IATE in software solutions

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Since the European institutions decided to make the terminology of the EU database IATE free and available for any use, a lot of organisations, institutions, and universities, together with private companies, provide terminology files extracted from IATE in TBX format.

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This has proven to be a very useful feature also for freelance translators, since it allows them to select and download a terminology file from a specific domain in their language pair and to upload it to the CAT tool they are using to translate, integrating such terminology into their working environment without having to check manually for each term.

The usefulness of such feature has led one of the biggest networks of professional translators, Proz.com, to recently include in its services these specialised term files extracted from IATE. InterpretBank, a recently developed software to assist interpreters with terminology management, also uses IATE as a source of terminology from all fields of EU legislation.

The biggest advantages of such terminological data are its multilingual nature, since IATE covers the 24 official languages of the European Union (i.e. 552 language combinations) together with its reliability, since the source from which terms are extracted where is IATE-public, which contains entries that have been compiled through the work of thousands of translators working for the linguistic services of all EU Institutions and ultimately validated by terminologists of the relevant languages.

The providers of IATE-based data belong to several fields of language-related activities, and can be found in several countries and through several websites. Some examples are SanTrans, CETRA, multifarious, TM-Town, TECH 4 FREELANCERS, the Finnish Terminology Organisation TSK, CETRABLOG, MateCat from Italy or Translatum from Greece.

If you also wish to benefit from this feature, the Terminology Coordination of the European Parliament provides in its website an easy and free tool (IATExtract) to extract targeted sets of terminology data from the 8.5 million terms available in IATE.


Written by Rodolfo Maslias, Head of Terminology Coordination at the European Parliament (Luxembourg).

Post prepared by Doris Fernandes del Pozo – Journalist, Translator-Interpreter and Communication Trainee at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament.