Toward an harmonized second edition of the Multilingual Demographic Dictionary: the Demopædia project

The Demopædia project has set, as a first goal, to give access to demographers all editions of the Multilingual Demographic Dictionary published since the 50's. Computerization has shown that if the first editions were consistent over the 1100 concepts, very large gaps, most often due to omissions undermined the overall quality of the second edition of the multilingual dictionary, 1492 concepts for the French (1981), 1475 for the English (1982), 1495 Spanish (1985),1555 for the German (1987). The harmonization process consists in maximizing the corpus to 1581 concepts. The Communication will review the volumes already harmonized in French and Italian, published or forthcoming, as the new Asian languages that emerged after the workshops of Paris (2007) and Chiang Mai (2012).
If we may regret a modern third edition, this standardization process is a necessary step. The availability of all texts and cross-languages indexes on any kind of media from paper book up to digital tablets is an asset. This harmonization phase is also an opportunity for the community of demographers to prepare the third edition by proposing a succinct definition of new terms or expressions which are emerging on the Open Encyclopedia Population platform both in English and in about 20 languages.