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Finnish translation service

By Hilary Picken | February 26, 2019 | Languages

Finnish translation

All of our professional native Finnish translators are specialists in their chosen sector, have a minimum of five years’ experience and hold a diploma, BA or MA in translation. No matter what you need to have translated, our translation experts will draw upon their knowledge base to ensure that the exact meaning is conveyed across your language barrier.

 

What to expect from our Finnish translation service

 

Despite Finnish being classed as a Nordic language, it bears little or no resemblance to the Scandinavian languages it is classed alongside. Finnish, more accurately, is a Finnic language of the Uralic family of languages. The languages with the highest number of native speakers in this family are Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian and they share some common traits such as – and this is one for the grammar aficionados – case suffixes, possessive suffixes and various derivational suffixes.

Finnish is the official language of Finland, alongside Swedish, and is spoken by around five million people, most of whom live in Finland. When translating texts into Finnish to reach this many people, it is worth noting that a Finnish sentence will typically be shorter and simpler than the English equivalent due to the way words combine in the Finnic languages. Though the words themselves are often significantly longer, you will need to consider formatting your documents to ensure the look and feel of your materials doesn’t get lost in translation.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Finns were in a quiet conflict with the ruling Swedish authorities over the status of their native language. The ‘language strife’ didn’t fully end until the 1930s.

Interesting facts about the Finnish language

 

  1. Written, or ‘Standardised’, Finnish is a constructed language designed for literature, and is different from colloquial Finnish in a number of small but important ways.
  2. Elias Lönnrot is responsible for much of how written Finnish functions today. An active advocate of the language, he is also the compiler of the Kalevala, the greatest work of Finnish legend. His closest English equivalent would be someone like Geoffrey Chaucer, who popularised writing in English with his Canterbury Tales.
  3. During World War Two, a Finnish word for courage, “sisu”, became much praised by the British. The word more accurately means a stoic determination and bravery under any circumstances, and is widely held to be the national characteristic of the Finn.
  4. Finnish is a major inspiration for Quenya, one of the Elven languages in The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, giving the language much of its grammar. Perhaps acknowledging this, Tolkien’s poem about Turin Turambar is based heavily on the story of Väinämöinen, the main character in the Kalevala.
  5. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Finns were in a quiet conflict with the ruling Swedish authorities over the status of their native language. The ‘language strife’ didn’t fully end until the 1930s.