A complete bibliography of interpreting and translation just one click away

Abstract

The article is a brief presentation of the structure, aims and rationale of BITRA (Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation of Alicante). BITRA is an on-line database which already (November, 2001) comprises more than 8,000 documents and which aspires to cover all the literature on interpreting and translation taking advantage of information technology. This database is: (1) International: It accepts works from any country and written in any language, and although English is the lingua franca, there are several working languages (Spanish, Catalan, German, French and English are already used, and Dutch will follow shortly) so that as many users as possible can search in their mother tongues. (2) Annotated: Apart from the mere bibliographic information, there are metatextual fields aimed at offering an abstract, commenting on special traits of the text or reproducing the table of contents. (3) Interactive: There is a system for suggestions and contributions that allows users to propose changes in the existing data or the inclusion of new documents. (4) Flexible: Apart from its interactive possibilities, BITRA allows searches to be performed using any criterion or combination of criteria, from author, language or type of document to the subjects the documents deal with. (5) Open and free: In keeping with its academic nature, BITRA is open to everybody without any sort of subscription or payment.