Brunnen

Thin translations

Järjestellessämme tervetuliaisjuhlallisuuksia huomasimme epäkohdan talossammekin.
=As we were organizing the welcoming ceremony, we noticed a fault in our house, too.

Finnish words are looooong, and I've met some slightly frustrated people who cannot understand why we Finns haven't done anything about it. I thought it might be interesting to know that long words might actually mean short books. Read the points below to find out more.

A) I don't really know why the Finns write 'rautatieasema' instead of 'rauta tie asema'. In English, the equivalent is naturally 'railway station' (but why not 'rail way station' or 'railwaystation'?) It is true that there might be a greater amount of long words in Finnish, but those compounds - written in the Finnish way of adding all words together - makes most texts actually shorter. If you look at the example above, you can see that the spaces between the English words actually make the sentence slightly longer than the Finnish one. In a novel, this finally results in a great difference in length. Books translated into Finnish are in fact thinner -- but more packed.

B) Metrotunnelissa oli talossanikin seinillä olevaa maalia.
(=In the metro tunnel, there was paint that I also had in the walls of my house)

In principle, there would be the possibility to make these long Finnish words look shorter by cutting them to smaller particles.

Metro tunneli ssa oli talo ssa ni kin seini llä olevaa maalia.

It's a bit weird to read that but it is still fully understandable. The English equivalent for the long Finnish sentences would be
'Inthemetrotunnel, there was paint I had inthewallsofmyhouse'.(This of course is not entirely true - all kinds of endings in Finnish are in fact not independent words, but words in, on, under and of are)

I hadn't been using any Finnish for weeks when I started to read a scientific Finnish publication in the beginning of this year. It was a study book containing some biology, chemistry and physics. That was five months ago, and when I yesterday returned back to those pages, it was hilarious to see my own hand-written -- slashes everywhere! I had found it so hard to perceive some extremely long scientific names that I had split the words into their particles. When reading those pages full of "yksi/fotoni/emissio/tomografia"-markings I couldn't help thinking how practical it might be to write it all separate.

posted by Anicko @ 3:27 AM