A model of an electronic terminological dictionary for international students of engineering universities

Abstract

The article describes the features of developing a thesaurus-type electronic translation terminological dictionary model for international students of engineering universities taking into account their real communicative needs. Electronic materials for self-study are in short supply. This gap can be filled by digital systems in the form of translation terminological dictionaries. The existing reference systems have a number of disadvantages that make them inaccessible to most foreign users. The main problem of the latter is the poor level of proficiency in the Russian language, in particular Russian for specific purposes. The translation terminology dictionary model, developed by one of the authors, is a mobile application on the Android platform that allows one to search for terms from different sources, automatically highlighting the terms in the text, importing them, determining their meaning in context, offering their translation into English, implementing the functions of adding notes to the term and new terms, adding them to the favorites and offering tests that check the knowledge of the terms. The options for adding terms can be used by both a teacher and a foreign user, with the only difference that the teacher has the ability to add terms to a remote database accessible to all users, and the student ‒ to a local database, where he/she has the ability to translate the terms into his/her native language, which helps create an individual terminology dictionary for different disciplines and to form the subject component of their communicative competence.