The Swiss Art and Architecture Thesaurus® Translation Project

The Swiss Art and Architecture Thesaurus® (CH-AAT) translation project of the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® of the Getty Research Institute is part of the comprehensive initiative Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI). Integrating multilingual and international controlled vocabularies is indeed a complementary process to data modelling, and consists an essential component for the interoperability of contents from collections of heritage, cultural and research institutions.
Initial analyses were conducted and project specifications shaped in 2017. Consecutively, the project became more concrete at the beginning of 2019 with the development of a platform based on technologies of the semantic web, as well as through establishing a network of partners with whom concepts to be translated were defined. Far beyond a simple website, the platform, in addition to aggregating translated concepts, supports streamlining complex workflows that involve the different actors involved in the translation tasks (translators, administrators and editors).

Goals
With CH-AAT, SARI is dedicated to coordinating the translation and publication of the English-language Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® into the Swiss national languages French, German and Italian. While some translations from institutions around the world have already been integrated into the global AAT, SARI enriches the AAT by closing gaps in translations, and by proposing terms for appropriate descriptions of cultural heritage and its objects in Switzerland.

SARI is dedicated to

• promoting and publishing available translations through a specific platform,
• coordinating translations for domains not yet covered (integrated translation of the scope notes and add of sources),
• broadening the thesaurus of existing concepts with Swiss and regional terms,
• integrating translated and additional terms in the original mother-thesaurus in cooperation with the Getty Research Institute.

Organisation
As a contributor to the Getty Vocabularies, SARI coordinates the CH-AAT translation project and employs specialists for the translation of concepts. Hereby, SARI invites interested institutions and researchers either to submit their translations directly or to register themselves as experts in order to contribute to translating parts of the thesaurus.
SARI is member of the French-speaking project BEINFRAT, an initiative of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) and the Art & History Museum (KMKG-MRAH) in Brussels, a network of cultural and art historical research institutions that work on the translation of the AAT into the French language. The Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris and the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN-RCIP) in Ottawa are also partners of this network.