Multilingual thesaurus on land tenure:
Chinese version

General editor: Gérard Ciparisse, Land Tenure Service of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Following the World Food Summit held in 1996, FAO’s Land Tenure Service undertook the task of publishing a dictionary of land tenure terminology in the Organization’s working languages, in order to contribute to clarifying land tenure issues as well as to assist in field work in this area. Two broad objectives guided the publication of a complete linguistic series of land tenure thesauri. First, they were expected to contribute to ongoing analysis in the field of land tenure and the work of land tenure specialists. At the same time, they were intended to serve as useful tools for beginners, especially for students or researchers from other fields.

The Land Tenure Service is now pleased to announce the publication of the Chinese version of the Multilingual Thesaurus on Land Tenure. This version, reflecting the land tenure context specific to China, has been enriched with a brief introduction in three languages (Chinese, English and French) on the evolution of land tenure regimes in China. It also contains an index in these three languages which will make it possible for non-Chinese speakers to discover the Chinese words developed in this publication.

In 1999 the first volume was published on land-tenure terms in use in French-speaking countries: this was the Thésaurus multilingue du foncier. It covered the following sectors: legal, institutional, historical, description of space, traditional or written land tenure regulations, topographical, land management and land tenure information techniques. In 2003, Spanish and English versions were published. In October 2005 the second French edition of the original 1999 publication, completely revised and enlarged, was published and is now available in electronic form (PDF).

Each of the four language versions published up until now takes into account the socio-economic, institutional and cultural contexts of the linguistic sphere of the language of publication. Thus one individual thesaurus is not so much a translation or an adaptation of the other, as an explanation of land tenure concepts in the socio-cultural and lingustic context specific to each language. It is to be hoped that a synpotic reading of the four languages of the Multilingual thesaurus on land tenure in four of FAO’s working languages will make it possible to grasp the evolution in the domain of land tenure that are highlighted by comparison among different languages.

(available in Chinese, with introductory material in English and French; will soon be online as HTML)

Click here to view the document (pdf format) or here for zip downloadable file.

The other language versions of the thesaurus are available:

Multililngual Thesaurus on Land Tenure: HTML; PDF (English)

Tesauro Plurilingüe de Tierras: HTML, PDF (Spanish)

Thésaurus multilingue du foncier, version française, deuxième édition, revue et augmentée (French; will soon be online as HTML and PDF)

Multilingual thesaurus on land tenure: Chinese version

Multilingual thesaurus on land tenure:
Chinese version