Kääntäjät, koulutus ja kansanvalistus

Authors

• Outi Paloposki

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61200/mikael.145921

Abstract

Translator training in Finland was recently celebrating its 40th anniversary. Training is not a oneway
process, though; translators, too, have been training and educating ordinary readers throughout
the nearly five hundred years of Finland’s literary history. Tasks such as selecting and putting
together material to be translated, adapting it to Finnish environment and needs, or explaining the
many strange or difficult phenomena and issues for the readers, have always been as central in
translators’ work as translation itself. Furthermore, translators have created new vocabulary and
participated in the discussions on developing or standardizing written language. In this article, I
will discuss the translators’ different roles and focus on cultural mediation through translators’
footnotes. The practice of annotation has not been widely researched, strangely enough: it is a
rich field of insights for the study of translators’ agency and visibility, among other things.