The main aim of the PortLinguE project is to build an online portal with two main components:
- a kind of contextualized Portuguese-English dictionary of technical vocabulary from areas such as medicine, mathematics or physics. This dictionary will operate on the basis of a cross-language search engine capable of querying open access documents in academic repositories, mainly RCAAP. To ensure the reliability of results, all of these documents will be carefully selected and processed;
- lists of typical expressions from these scientific areas, in Portuguese and English. By expressions it is meant terms that are composed of more than one word and usually appear together. Despite the focus on academic texts, these lists will include not only expressions from each of those areas, but also the most representative expressions found in academic texts, which presumably are common to all or almost all areas.
Alongside these two components, the portal will also include multimodal contents (e.g., interviews, digital narratives, infographics) concerning different areas of science. The contents will be produced by individual as well as collective entities, ranging from R&D institutes to scientists and students from different levels of education.
PortLinguE aims to serve a wide range of users (teachers, students, linguists, researchers, lexicographers, translators, etc.) with different needs, such as: apprehension of language conventions, recognition of discursive phraseology (monolingual and bilingual), aid to writing in native and foreign languages, language teaching and learning for specific purposes, analysis of specialized discourse in diverse communicative situations and creation of lexicographic and terminological resources.