Finnish Translation

The translation load of a language with fifteen cases

Like Turkish, this language adds its endings at the end of the word, knows no grammatical gender and applies vowel harmony. The structural kinship is real; the number of cases, however, is far greater, and some of those cases carry on their own the relations that Turkish expresses with postpositions. This lowers the word count in translation, but it raises word length appreciably.

The real difficulty is that the stem of a word alters once an ending is attached. Consonants weaken or drop according to fixed rules, so knowing the dictionary form of a noun is not enough to produce the form it takes in the text. With personal and institutional names, this is where translators go wrong most often.

There is no separate conjugation for the future; the undertaking formulas of Turkish are rendered with the present tense and with contextual adverbs. In a contract the consequence is that the time of performance has to be fixed not by the wording but by a date written out separately.

How endings are attached to foreign names

In this language nouns take endings according to their function in the sentence, and foreign names are no exception to the rule. The writing convention provides for a mark placed between the two so that the ending is not confused with the name itself; the passport spelling is thereby left intact and the ending is visibly kept apart.

In the translation of official documents, though, the safest course is to build the sentence so that the name can stay in its base form. In identity fields the name is under no circumstances inflected; inflection is applied only in running text, and only where it cannot be avoided.

Issue	Wrong solution	Right solution
Name in an identity field	Inflecting it for case	Leaving it in the base form
Institutional name	Inflecting it by altering the stem	Keeping the original name and adding a gloss
Turkish special characters	Replacing them with near letters	Preserving the passport spelling
Long noun phrases	Compressing them into a single word	Breaking them into intelligible parts

Which documents are translated

Residence and work applications form the largest share. Seasonal agricultural and forestry work, the recruitment of healthcare staff and the IT sector each call for a different set of documents: employment contract, professional certificates, medical report and criminal record certificate. The second share is higher education; applications ask for the diploma, the academic transcript and course descriptions.

The third share is industry. In forest products, machinery and marine technologies, technical specifications, maintenance instructions and inspection reports are translated on a regular basis. The fourth is the localisation of interfaces and terms of use for the software and games sector; here, unlike in document translation, the length of the text is constrained by the interface fields.

The density of long words peculiar to this language turns interface translation into a speciality of its own. The narrow spaces allotted to button and menu text may not hold even a single inflected word; in that case a shorter structure that preserves the meaning is sought, and the word is not cut off.

Submitting documents in an administration with two official languages

The administrative order of this country has two official languages, and municipalities count as monolingual or bilingual according to the make-up of their population. Which category the place of submission falls into determines directly which language the translation is made into.

Two mistakes are common in practice. The first is to look at the name of the country and choose the majority language automatically; yet in some coastal settlements business is conducted in the other language. The second is that when a monolingual translation is submitted to a bilingual municipality, a second version is asked for, which means preparing the whole file again.

Place names are affected by the same duality: many settlements have a separate name in each language. In translation, the form used by the administration the document is going to is preferred, and the other form is shown in brackets where necessary.

Dates and identity numbers

Dates are written in the order day, month, year, with full stops; no leading zero is placed before the day and month figures. When the month is given in words it begins with a lower-case letter and takes its own case ending.

The personal identity number contains a separator showing the date and the century of birth; leaving that separator out invalidates the number. The decimal separator is a comma and the thousands separator a space. Send us your document stating the target institution; get a quotation for the timescale and the amount, and look over the detailed rate table.