cally secure that terms adopted were those acceptable to the subject
specialists in each country; however, in most versions of UDC,
headings in different languages are frequently not direct translations
of one another. In the ABC an attempt has been made to ensure
that the terms used are equivalent. Editions have been published
in ten languages and three others are in preparationit is intended
that this work should be capable of being used for this purpose.
While on this subject, mention should perhaps be made of terminol
ogical control exercised by specialised international organisations;
AIG, FIG, CIB, and ISP are all examples of organisations which,
among their other functions, have undertaken the responsibility
of cultivating and weeding the terminology of their specialities
in the general interest of science.
4.1.11 One of the problems of a multilingual dictionary is keeping
it up-to-date and here the fact that a work is in a bound volume is a
serious limitation. A possible alternative is the card catalogue,
which provides opportunities for keeping up-to-date but creates
problems of reproduction and interfiling. As a way of collecting
and marshalling material for a dictionary to be later printed in a
book form, the card index or something like it is indispensible on
account of its flexibility. Photographic methods are available
whereby material so collected can be reproduced cheaply for dis
tribution either on cards or in page form without having to be
recopied by hand and therefore to be rechecked. These methods
offer possible solutions to the problem of the provision of specialised
subject vocabularies where the demand does not justify printing a
dictionary in a book form.
4.1.12 UNESCO has published a 'Bibliography of Interlingual
Scientific and Technical Dictionaries'4th ed. 1961, which gives
reference to about 2500 special dictionaries connecting two or more
of some 75 languages. These are indexed by language 'from' and
'into', and are arranged by subject in accordance with the UDC
scheme. Class 52 (Astronomy, Geodesy, Cartography and Land
Surveying) contains 30 referencesclass 69 (Building), 35 references
class 711 (Town and Country Planning), 4 references; and class
72 (Architecture), 100 references. From this work it would appear
that the most plentiful language connections are German into
English, and English into German. In contrast, Asian languages
are very poorly represented.
4.2 Translation Services
4.2.1 There is little point in translating an article when a trans
lation already exists and some countries have developed quite
elaborate procedures in an attempt to avoid duplication and wasted
effort. One of the most important English language indexes is the
Commonwealth Index to Unpublished Scientific and Technical
Translations. Starting in 1951 each cooperating country agreed to
appoint an agency to maintain a master index which covers the
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