This article aims to show that the furthering of african languages as a means of information and education makes it necessary that these languages be 'instrumentalised', i.e. supplied with all the tools that are indispensable for their development (orthographic nomalisation, a grammar, dictionaries and so forth). Of these tools the terminological enrichment plays a central role. However, this terminological activity has to be conducted in a sociological and cultural context whose specificity in a certain sense puts constraints on the methodology. This is illustrated by the translation of the Declaration of Human Rights in sängo, one of the official languages in the Central African Republic.

The aim of this article is to present a practical implementation of the notion of a "domain" for the automatic processing of domain information and its application to information retrieval on the web. After a discussion of the problems that arise when assigning a text to a given domain, we will define a domain as a set of hyperclasses (such as human, concrete, locative, actions etc.) and of object classes, which correspond to the structure of a simple sentence into predicates and arguments. This semantic-syntactic information is already encoded in general and technical language dictionaries. In these dictionaries we distinguish between simple and compound words. On the basis of the dictionaries we will tag web pages. A first application has enabled the search engine Alta Vista to identify 29 languages. We have also found that the identification of compound word allows queries that lead to more precise and more rapid results, compared to search algorithms that work exclusively with the simple words of the compound expression. Information retrieval can thus be considerably improved by taking into account compound words. An application of this research will be the retrieval of texts in medical language that we are carrying out in the framework of the European Commission research project Webling.

The study presented here touches on documentation and terminology, these domains being very often linked together in the context of industry. Building up a thesaurus is considered from a linguistic viewpoint through various corpus studies and on both a formal and a semantic level. In this article will be treated successively the acceptation of terms in the terminological corpus specific for the gas industry, the constitution of domains on the basis of this list and by interviews of specialists for each of these domains.