Look up ETH Zurich-related terminology online
Ever found yourself wondering about the right English or German word to use at ETH Zurich? Corporate Communications has come up with a resource to help you easily find the information you need.??
We have created an online glossary (otherwise known as a term base) of predominantly ETH-related terminology. Called ETH CC terminology, this term base contains around 1,700 terms. You can search for terms in both directions – from German to English and from English to German. Each entry includes the sources in both languages and a definition where available.
What an entry looks like:
How to log in
Go to the Corporate Communications website: /staffnet/en/service/communication/corporate-design/language-style-guides.html
You will find the term base near the bottom of the page beneath the style and language guides.
Click on the German-English term base (called QTerm) and log in as follows:
You will be taken to the following page:
You can view the landing page in English, German, Hungarian, Spanish, French, Japanese, or Chinese. However, the ETH CC terminology term base is only available in English and German.
You actually have two term bases at your disposal:
ETH CC terminology
ETH CC multilingual
ETH CC terminology
How to look up a term
To locate all entries in the term base that include the German word “Diplom” along with their English translations, follow these steps:
Enter “Diplom” as the term you wish to search for.
Select German as the first language and English as the second.
Click on “Search”.
The system will display all entries in the term base that contain the word “Diplom” – in this case, 9 entries. You can see the first two matches in the screenshot below:
Browsing the term base
To get an idea of the contents of the term base, follow these steps:
Log in as described above.
Select “ETH CC terminology” from the list of term bases.
Select the “First language” and “Second language and then click on “Browse term base”.
You will be taken to page one (letter “A”) of the term base. By clicking on the arrow at the bottom right corner, you can browse through it, page by page:
Additional term base
In addition to our ETH CC terminology “German-English” term base, you have access to another resource:
ETH CC multilingual: This a compilation of key terminology from the ETH CC terminology term base, available in German, English, French and Italian. We used this term base as the foundation for the automatic translation of the ETH Zurich website into French and Italian.
ETH CC multilingual
You can search in all directions in our German, English, French and Italian multilingual term base. This term base comprises only translations, without any sources or definitions.
Select your desired language pair for the search and click on “Browse term base”:
When browsing the term base, you can also set the desired language pair by clicking on the drop-down boxes:
Example of a search for the term “Rektorat” from German into Italian:
Contact
While it may seem a bit complex at first, we hope that once you become familiar with it, you will find it very useful.
Please contact if you have any questions, would like to suggest terms that you think should be added to the term base, or find any broken URLs. Thank you.
Note on the translation
This text has been translated for your convenience using a machine translation tool. Although reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation, it may not be perfect. If in doubt, please refer to the German version.
Should you come upon significant translation mistakes, please send a short message to so that we can correct them. Thank you very much.
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