Parole per mangiare : Dizionari multilingue per Expo 2015

“Words for eating” is a terminology and lexicolgraphy project launched by the research group of the Department of Studies in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication of Milan University. The aim is to provide an active and scientific contribution to Expo 2015, by means of the creation of two multilingual terminology dictionaries: Voca3, a practical paper dictionary in Italian-English-Chinese, and Voca8, a specialized online database in eight languages. Four main subthemes have been pinpointed: biotechnology, food preparation, nutrition, food safety. Manifold methods, within the scope of domain-specific Chinese, have been applied: adoption of an onomasiological approach, selection of corpora and objectives, accurate analysis of wordlists, identification of equivalences in Italian-English-Chinese. A critical examination of diverse terminology repertoires and cultural-conceptual schemes, as well as the development of translation strategies to render non-specialized terms absent in Chinese, have been essential to the achievements of this research project.