INSTITUTIONS, INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETIES

THE MODEL OF SHARED RESPONSIBILITY IN THE BANK OF FINNISH TERMINOLOGY IN ARTS AND SCIENCES

EAFT Summit 201211.10.2012

Antti Kanner

The Bank of Finnish Terminology in Arts and Sciences

The Bank of Finnish Terminology in Arts and Sciences (BFT) is a five-year project aimed at forming a permanent infrastructure for continuous terminological work within the academic sector in Finland.

The motivation behind the project stems from language political concerns of Finnish losing ground as a language of higher education and research.

Diminishing status of Finnish as a language of research and higher education will influence the language as a corpus, especially terminology.

The BFT has so far taken a form of terminological database, accessible via the Internet through a wiki-based interface.

The interface and the practices and methods are being developed through three pilot projects of:• Botany• linguistics and• jurisprudence.

Terminological work is being performed by users, who have been granted expert status.

For the basis of the work, lexicons and excerpts relating to specific terminological entries from numerous volumes of each field have been imported to the database.

The database at the moment has 9 506 concept articles and 24 441 expression articles.

As an infrastructure, the main tasks of the BFT are to:

• enable terminological work within the academic sector and

• provide a channel for it to share its terminology not just within the research community, but with wider audience as well.

• encourage multidisciplinary discussion on terminology

• enhance the use of parallel languages in the research community and with public

BFT can also function as a medium for raising awareness on terminology and language policy.

The strategy of BFT, in the end, is to enable, facilitate and co-ordinate terminological work.

The core of the terminological work in the BFT framework is carried out by individual experts on their respective fields.

The experts writing the terminologies are professional researchers, teachers and post-graduate students of their respective fields working in the academic institutions.

Institutional responsibility

In the perspective of institutional responsibility on terminology, the relevant institutions in the case of BFT are academic institutions (universities and research centres).

This makes quite a differing crowd: Finland has 19 universities and 65 research institutes or centers.

The largest of the universities, University of Helsinki, has around 35 000 students, the smallest, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, around 250.

Launching BFT can also be seen as a step towards fulfilling the terminological responsibility, at least from the part of the institutions directly involved:

• Academy of Finland• University of Helsinki• Federation of Finnish Learned Societies• Institute for the Languages of Finland

The BFT could also function as a medium for other institutions to carry out their terminological responsibilities.

Those universities, who have taken some initiative in defining their language policies, have acknowledged that they have at least some responsibility of maintaining and developing the Finnish and Swedish terminology of the fields practiced in them.

These acknowledgements usually take place in language policy programs, strategies or other declarations of the institutions. For example:

University of Helsinki Language Policy:

"Creating and maintaining domestic terminology within different disciplines is central to the University’s duty to interact with society."

Aalto University Language Guidelines:

“Aalto University plays an active role in developing Finnish and Swedish terminology for academic discourse.”

Almost all of the universities in Finland, who have published some language political documents have usually included statements of terminological responsibilities in them.

It is likely, thus, that terminology will be included in the documents published in the future as well.

However, it is more or less unclear, what “playing active role in developing terminology” actually means or entails.

What is clear though, is that terminology does not simply happen, even if it gets mentioned in a language strategy.

Terminology work is action or a process, and an as such needs people actually engaged in it to happen.

From the point of view of academic institutions, there are roughly three options:

1. Centralize all of the terminology work to a team, agency or office of professional terminologists.

2. Externalize terminological work to outside organizations.

3. Include terminology work in the curriculum of the staff.

The example of BFT would suggest, that if the language political statements have any effects, in Finland they will be in the lines of option 3.

However, even if there was a terminological infrastructure which would make it possible for individual researchers to take part in terminology work, academic institutions might still (inadvertently or not) prohibit it.

Academic institutions in Finland have yet failed to include terminological work as one of the activities measured quantitatively in the evaluations of individual researchers and departments.

The productivity of universities in Finland is so tightly measured and monitored, that it is virtually impossible for them to engage in any activities outside the measured criteria.

This in turn is not only up to the institutions in questions, since they can not alone set the criteria they are evaluated on.

It is not at all clear whether the academic institutions in Finland are capable of taking care of the terminological responsibilities they are so willing to acknowledge.

Even if the institutions would not actively prohibit individual researchers or teachers from taking part in terminological work in their field, this might be caused by the fact that terminology work is not taken account in when for example evaluating candidates for academic posts.

For this reason alone it might be, that maintaining and developing Finnish or Swedish terminology will probably not be part of professional academic work within academic institutions for any time soon.

A possibility now studied in BFT is making terminological work part of post-graduate studies.

There are clear strengths in this approach:• Post-graduate curriculums are more flexible than

evaluation criteria.• Post-graduate students are usually more or less

closely supervised by experts of the field.• Post-graduate studies usually involve working with

the core terms and concepts of the field.• Being of younger generation than their supervisors,

they more easily adapt to the virtual environments (such as wikis and other collaboration platforms) necessary in the terminological work.

BFT also seeks to make use of the existing social structure of learned societies through the partnership with the FFLS.

Many of the learned societies have long traditions in Finnish terminology work and are already active. BFT tries to bring this activity under one umbrella and infrastructure.

Through the learned societies terminology might make its way to the centre of the self-understanding of an academic field. This in turn might raise its importance and value inside the academic institutions as well and trigger the necessary changes to make working with terminology part of academic profession.