Restoring the Tower of Babel: building a multilingual thesaurus on health promotion

In 1994 the International Union for Health Promotion and Health Education, Regional Office for Europe (IUHPE/EURO), began a thesaurus project in the field of health promotion and health education, in collaboration with terminologists and health promotion specialists from various European countries. This article describes the different phases of the international project. Special attention is paid to the origin of the project and the international cooperative imperative needed to bring such a project to fruition.