ITOLDU, a web service to pool technical lexical terms in a learning environment and contribute to multilingual lexical databases

Abstract

The first stage of the ITOLDU project aims to facilitate technical English teaching, especially for vocabulary acquisition. We are pursuing two immediate goals: maximizing positive student contributions, even outside of the classroom, and minimizing teacher intervention. The resulting application is designed to support investigations on what can entice users to contribute collaboratively towards enriching a bilingual technical lexicon in a fertile teaching context. The second stage will be to investigate how to use ITOLDU and similar tools to elicit free (but not necessarily voluntary or even conscious) contributions to the research-oriented, linguistically very rich multilingual PAPILLON lexical database. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.