A lexicographic platform for migration terminology: problems and methods

“Language on the Fly” is a lexicographic resource for the domain of migration. The peculiarity of migration lexicon is due to scope (often geographical and institutional) and time. The language of migration is found on an international level where it is defined, for example, by institutions, like the EU regulations (both legal and administrative); on a national level, where general international procedures are modified and adapted to the specific country administrative and general migration policies and, finally, on an ordinary level which is interlinked to issues that migrants have to face in their interactions with institutions ( social security, health, education, administrative issues). This paper focuses on corpus-based procedures used to build the second version made of a set of 2,094 entries and collocations starting from Italian language corpora specifically built to represent the three levels of lexicon, and further translated in 5 EU languages and 10 non-EU languages. The translation process also involves corpus-based techniques and multilingual corpora. Building the lemma list on three - specially built - Italian corpora using keyword extraction techniques, the glossary also uses corpus-based techniques to extract glosses that are further rewritten using controlled language in Italian in order to facilitate the use in cultural mediation contexts.