Terminology work in enhancing multilingualism in the academic setting

"This paper focuses on The Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences (HTB) as a means to enhance multilingualism. The HTB is an open website offering a database for researchers in different fields of arts and sciences to add and update terms and conceptual knowledge of their field. Furthermore, the website is a platform for discussion, also between experts and laymen. The method to add contents in the HTB is niche-sourcing: the rights to modify the contents are restricted to the researchers of the field in question. The aims of the HTB are to enhance multilingualism, to promote the scientific use of the national and minority languages of Finland, and to activate multidisciplinary discussions on scientific concepts. The multilingual features of the HTB include not just term equivalents in different languages, but also a possibility to add definitions and to start fields in different languages. Most of the fields are in Finnish, but there are also fields in English, Swedish and Romany. The HTB website has been in use since 2012. Although the principles of the HTB are stated in the Language Policy of the University of Helsinki (UH), and the HTB is included in the national research infrastructure via its participation in FIN-CLARIN, the activation of researchers to participate in the HTB is not unproblematic. We will discuss the expressed attitudes, both pro and con, and relate them to the user statistics of the website, and the activity of experts in different fields. Our overview will also be based on a user survey that will be conducted in September 2019. The findings concerning the HTB will be linked to a wider academic setting in which everyday practices meet institutional conditions for promoting collaboration and co-authorship and different ideological stances in the language policies of the universities."