This paper presents the Terminology training possibilities offered by Terminology Without Borders (TWB), a project of the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament run through crowdsourcing. TWB provides free multilingual termbases made available to the public on a dedicated website. It can be classified as a Crowdsourcing for Education initiative, as the termbases are created through collaboration among the participants (students, university teachers, professional linguists and subject matter experts), recruited via open calls, and has the goal of educating future terminologists. Another goal of the project is to create a network of universities and individuals interested in Terminology.
This paper presents the Terminology training possibilities offered by Terminology Without Borders (TWB), a project of the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament (TermCoord) run through crowdsourcing 2 . The following sections focus on the objectives of the project, its innovative aspects, the work done by collaborators, the tools used and the evaluation of the learning outcomes.
The main goal of TWB is to facilitate communication "by tailoring terminology to citizens' needs" [3]. This is done by providing multilingual termbases created in collaboration with universities and professional linguists. These termbases are used also to enrich IATE, the terminology database of the European Union institutions [4]. Another goal of the project is to create a network of universities and individuals working in Terminology.
TWB can be classified as a Crowdsourcing for Education (CfE) initiative, "a type of online activity in which an educator, or an educational organization proposes to a group of individuals via a flexible open call to directly help learning or teaching" [5]. Indeed, in line with the requirements illustrated by the same authors: • TWB is managed by an organisation that aims to create and share terminological resources for educational purposes. • Anyone interested in Terminology can contribute to the creation of termbases3 .
• The contributors often collaborate on the same termbases.
One of the purposes of TWB is to train prospective terminologists 4 .
The participation to TWB benefits collaborators both educationally and professionally 5 . Concerning the educational benefits, students and linguists can complement or fine-tune their academic and professional background with hands-on practice in terminology work. Additionally, they acquire new knowledge on specific subjects and learn to use specialised tools. With respect to the professional benefits, they are awarded a certificate of participation, which they can include in a portfolio to showcase their experience. Moreover, all participants become part of a network of students and professionals interested in Terminology. Being part of the community, or the 'crowd', helps them to explore future job and educational interests and learn more from their peers.
In many cases, training in Terminology work is given within Translation university courses 6 . Some universities offer targeted Terminology courses for professionals, such as the University of Savoie-Mont Blanc [9] and the University of Barcelona Pompeu Fabra [10]. The University of Trieste has set up a multilingual terminographic database enriched by the work of its Translation and Interpreting students: TERMit7 . Terminographic records are drawn up under the supervision of the TERMit project managers and, where necessary, of subject matter experts.
Outside universities, terminology training is offered by professional organisations like Termnet, through its yearly Terminology Summer School [11] and the awarding of the ECQA Terminology Manager certificate [12].
We know of another international organisation that, similarly to the European Parliament's TermCoord, collaborates with university students to enrich their terminology database and train future terminologists: the Terminology Unit of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) 8 .
The innovative aspect of TWB, in comparison to the projects mentioned above are:
• TWB is open also to non-students. Usually these are professional linguists that look for additional training or experience in terminology work. • TWB accepts proposals of terminology projects in any language.
• The work done by all collaborators (students, university teachers, professional linguists and subject matter experts) is promoted and made accessible on a dedicated website.
The four-steps workflow proposed to collaborators for the creation of the termbases is summarised below.
1. Identification of the terms in one or more languages. This step involves term extraction from custom-made corpora and the selection of candidate terms. 2. Compilation of terminological tables. Universities and individual linguists can choose to work on the entire workflow and create a new subproject or to work on one or two of the steps. In the latter case, they can select one of the termbases already compiled and find equivalents in their working languages.
The main tools proposed to collaborators for the creation of corpora and the extraction of terms are Sketch Engine [13] and AntConc [14]. The former is free for all students at EU universities until March 2022, while the latter can be downloaded for free by anyone.
Since March 2021, collaborators have been encouraged to use of the FAIRterm application [15] for compiling the terminology records, as opposed to an Excel table. FAIRterm is a free tool built according to the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability). It was created as a guideline for those who want to enhance the ability of machines in finding and choosing the data and to support its reusability [16].
Integrating FAIRterm in the TWB workflow helped to standardize and harmonise the termbases created by the collaborators. Indeed, collaborators are not given the possibility to edit the data fields and cannot save their entries without filling in the compulsory fields, which enables the creation of termbases consistent with each other.
In order to collect feedback and evaluate the collaborators' learning outcomes, an online survey10 was sent to all participants of TWB. The results will provide insights on how to better adjust the workflow of TWB to address the collaborators' educational needs.
The work done by the collaborators is evaluated either by university teachers or TWB's coordinators 11 . The Steering Committee of TWB, composed of some of the university teachers involved in the project, has proposed the creation of a pool of subject matter experts who could revise the terminological entries. This would provide additional feedback to collaborators and improve the quality of their final work.
This paper presented Terminology Without Borders, a Crowdsourcing for Education initiative coordinated by TermCoord. Through voluntary collaborators, TWB provides multilingual termbases freely accessible on yourterm.eu. By working on the project, collaborators learn to perform terminology work, become part of a network of people interested in Terminology and gain recognition for their work. At present, to improve the quality of the termbases, TWB is in need of more experienced terminologists and subject matter experts for the validation phase for both EU and non-EU languages 12 . The recruitment of these experts could be done within the partner universities or through crowdsourcing platforms. In addition, it is essential to increase the involvement of the 'crowd' by sending periodic surveys and by creating focus groups. Gathering feedback from collaborators will help TWB coordinators to develop new and more personalised learning journeys, improve the training material 13and provide the necessary skills to be a terminologist.
Appendix 1
This survey aims at collecting feedback on the participation to "Terminology Without Borders" for research purposes. Please note that all your data (i.e. contact details) will be treated confidentially.