Topeliuksen Luonnonkirja (1860) ja sen käännetty erikoissanasto tieteellisessä digitaalisessa editiossa

Authors

• Reeta Holopainen Helsingin yliopisto

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61200/mikael.129373

Keywords:

digital editions, annotation, the history of Finnish literary language, language for special purpose

Abstract

Zacharias Topelius’ Luonnonkirja (1860) is a schoolbook, which was used to teach reading and natural science in the Finnish elementary schools until the early 1900s. The book was translated from the Swedish original Naturens Bok (1856) into Finnish by a journalist and vicar Johan Bäckvall (1817−1883). Bäckvall had to translate the book at the time when written Finnish was still developing and was not yet standardized. Bäckvall’s mission was challenging, because the book includes hundreds of natural science terms. In the 1800s, there was no established Finnish terminology in natural science, which resulted in a lot of variation in terms. Examining this variation and Bäckvall’s translations of terms are made possible by the digital edition of Topelius’ Luonnonkirja, currently being produced by The Finnish Literature Society (SKS) and The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS). This paper provides an overview of how the variation of translated natural science terminology will be dealt with in the digital edition of Luonnonkirja. The paper also provides a few examples of Bäckvall’s work, looking at how taxonomic names of plants and animals have been translated.