LEX: the Irish language terminology project

The LEX project, which is being carried out by Fiontar with funding from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, has provided Irish-language terminology services to EU institutions since 2008. Phase IV (2015-2016) is currently underway. Over 50,000 terms researched in Fiontar are now available in the inter-institutional, multilingual IATE database, leaving Irish ahead of other much larger ‘new’ EU languages such as Polish and Czech. Terms researched recently cover topical themes such as counter-terrorism, genetics and human rights. 

Other resources have also resulted from the project, including a parallel corpus of legal texts (c.9 million words) and a terminology database at Gaois.ie, which is used by legal translators and others. The LEX project is considered exemplary, and the report Terminology for the European Union The Irish Experience: The GA IATE Project (Bhreathnach, Cloke and Nic Pháidín) was published by Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 2013. The project is funded until 2016.