Designing a learner thesaurus as a didactic module for translators in oil and gas industry

This paper discusses the results of our research in developing the UNITECH training project and its information and linguistic support for the purposes of blended learning and teaching of foreign languages for special purposes and industrial translation. The project developed by our group aims not only to conduct research in the field of hybrid blended learning environments, to test and implement its methods and technologies, but also to present a toolkit of the UNITECH information system, as a platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), and to support industry translation and foreign language instruction for special purposes. Designing of a e-learning domain-oriented thesaurus in Oil and Gas Industry is one of the research and applied results of the current work on our project and a module of the training course in translation in Oil and Gas Industry, where the semantic resources explicitly reflect the conceptual network of this industry. The studies of the paper focuse on approaches and methodology in selecting the terminology of Oil and Gas Industry and designing the structure of the learner thesaurus when analysing the terminology on the basis of the certain research content. We claim that one of the fundamental problems in developing the learners' content when creating the special industry courses and professional resources is the need to narrow the terminological and thematic samples to the core industry concepts and their terminological units. As a result, we developed the Petroleum Engineering Thesaurus as a free open resource that includes web pages of dictionary articles to be used both independently and as a component of the didactic environment of our main module of the UNITECH platform with MOOC-courses in industrial translation.