This project (January 2022 to December 2025) analyzes translation policies and practices guiding the translation of information targeted at migrant populations. The research focuses on the organizations active in the Greater Helsinki Area (Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa) and in Tallinn, Estonia, including municipalities, NGOs, companies, institutions of higher learning, and the media. The project is funded by the KONE foundation. The project combines the theories and methodologies of functionalist and sociological translation studies and critical approaches to linguistics.
Multilingualism often is perceived as constituting a challenge to democracy: the language barrier prevents many migrants from having the opportunity to be involved in social, cultural, and political life and to operate as members of their local communities and the society as a whole. Translation policy is an important tool to promote the integration of migrants. Today, translated information is readily available on websites and social media. However, the COVID-19 crisis has shown that all migrants do not use the information or have access to it. The exact reasons why the information does not reach all the end users are not known. This brings to the fore the need to do a thorough analysis of the guiding principles, implementation, and effectiveness of current translation policies and practices in migration contexts.
We approach translation as a practice of governmentality and power production that allows the participation of migrants but can lead to inadvertent inequalities and discriminations. We analyze the texts providing the foundations for current translation policies, a sample of translated texts, and the online environments in which the translations are disseminated. In addition, we interview persons who take part in the different phases of design, implementation, and consumption of translation policies and practices. The goal is to propose solutions in cooperation with the stakeholders in order to improve the quality of translation policies and practices.
Participants:
Simo Määttä (PI), Tuija Kinnunen, Päivi Kuusi, Svetlana Probirskaja, Tanya Escudero (Tallinn University), and Jekaterina Maadla (Tallinn University).
The project uses playback theater to explore the narratives and affects that Russian-speakers in Finland (including Russian language students, translators, and interpreters) associate with Russian language and culture, especially regarding Finnish official communication translated into Russian. The project is part of a larger project funded by the Kone Foundation (Translation, Immigration and Democracy).
Partners:
University of Helsinki team:
Simo Määttä
Päivi Kuusi
Svetlana Probirskaja
Playback theater is a form of community theatre and improvisation based on real, personal stories told by the audience during the performance. The director interviews the audience, and the actors then perform the story. Playback theater is an art form enabling the treatment of power relations and social conflicts, as well as invisible prejudices and accessibility issues – in a safe space, from the perspective of the participants themselves.
The material, information, and knowledge created in this project are necessary in a context of particularly tense relations between Finland and Russia, with the border between the two countries almost closed and a high level of suspicion in relation to the presence of Russian language in Finland. The project produces new knowledge on the sore points, vulnerabilities, and polarization related to Russian language and culture – considering the viewpoints of different communities of speakers of Russian in Finland.
Three playback theater workshops, recorded on two video cameras, were produced in 2024 and 2025. Two interpreters translating between Finnish and Russian were present during the workshops. The data are analyzed by examining the narratives and the linguistic interaction as affective phenomena. In addition to academic output, general-interest publications will be produced.
The project approaches translation from various perspectives, in a very wide sense: the workshops were based on texts translated from Finnish into Russian, and all speech was interpreted between Finnish and Russian. In addition, the director interpreted the participants’ stories and reworded them for the actors, who acted out the stories and the affects they contained.
TRAST researchers Marjut Alho and Mari Pakkala-Weckström participated in the Internationalisation of Finnish Media project funded by the Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland in 2024 as partners of the media content producer A-lehdet Group. The aim of the project was to produce AI-translated lifestyle content for international markets, and our researchers developed and evaluated a translation tool and produced research related to the project. The project included two M.A. courses in which students mapped the quality of AI translations and post-edited the translations. In addition, three M.A. theses will be written on topics related to the project.
Migrants are one of the vulnerable groups most negatively affected by the COVID-19 crisis at various levels (unemployment, economic instability, etc.). Those who do not speak the language of the host country face bigger challenges and higher risks in the face of emergency situations, such as the current pandemic, for linguistic diversity has not been systematically integrated into crisis planning.
This project aims at developing an appropriate communication plan, based on effective translation practices and policies, which can provide a quick response to the current crisis and future emergency situations in disseminating relevant information among migrant communities. It also seeks to strengthen cooperation between the states of the Sea Baltic Region to deal with cross-border emergencies and use the knowledge generated by this cooperation to tackle problems at the local/state level.
This project analyzes the information provided during the COVID-19 crisis by stakeholders from different sectors (governmental institutions, companies, universities, NGOs and media) in Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, focusing on the methods, nature, and accessibility of information provided to those with poor skills in the official languages. This analysis in the three states involved enables us to carry out a cross-national comparative study to identify good practices and suggest new strategies for translation policies.
The resulting guidelines for communicating essential multilingual information to migrants will contribute to a faster recovery from the current crisis and can be adapted and scaled to address future emergency situations in the Baltic Sea Region.
The project starts in October 2021 and ends in September 2022 and is funded by the Council of the Baltic Sea States.
The project is coordinated by Tanya Escudero (Tallinn University). The Helsinki team includes Simo Määttä, Tuija Kinnunen, and Svetlana Probirskaja. The partners include also Radošās Idejas (Creative Ideas), an NGO based in Riga.
Source of image: The National Archives of Finland, R. H. Rehbinderin arkisto, Johan Albert Ehrenström 1821-1826 (Ba:9) (113).
Assistant Professor Simo Määttä, M.A. Merja Nivala, and Professor Emeritus Juhani Härmä
Funding: Finnish Cultural Foundation
In this project, a selection of the correspondence between Johan Albrecht Ehrenström and his colleagues Carl Johan Walleen and Robert Henrik Rehbinder was translated from French and Swedish into Finnish. These statesmen were influential public figures at the beginning of the Russian rule in Finland, during the first decades of the 19th century. Mr. Ehrenström lived and worked in Helsinki, whereas Mr. Walleen and Mr. Rehbinder lived and worked in Saint Petersburg. The letters are stored in the National Archives of Finland.
The correspondence deals mainly with the construction of a new administrative center of Helsinki, capital of Finland since 1812, as well as the relationship between the Czar and the Grand Duchy of Finland and other current and private affairs. Most letters are written in French, which was the lingua franca of the elites in the early 19th century. French was also the language of communication between the Swedish-speaking administration of the Grand Duchy of Finland and the Czar’s Russian-speaking administration. Many letters are bilingual, for Swedish is used as well. It is important to translate these letters into Finnish, so that Finnish researchers can use them more widely.
The project started by a thematic classification of Ehrenström’s letters. Subsequently, a selection was be transcribed, translated into Finnish, and published. The project was coordinated by Assistant Professor Simo Määttä. M.A. Merja Nivala was responsible for cataloguing, transcribing, and translating the letters. Counselling was provided by Professor Emeritus Juhani Härmä, who has analysed letters belonging to this collection in his research.
Methods for Managing Audiovisual Data: Combining Automatic Efficiency with Human Accuracy
An EU funded Horizon2020 research project (2018-2020)
In the MeMAD project, an international consortium of research and business partners developed methods of accessing audiovisual content through language (video description, subtitling, and linked data). The aim was to combine human and machine translation efforts to create an improved model of information extraction, retrieval, and search. The model is capable of creating descriptions that are not only time-aligned semantic extractions of objects but also make use of the audio and recognize action sequences. Such methodology can revolutionize video management and digital storytelling in broadcasting and media production, and help dealing with the growing amount of audiovisual big data. In addition, MeMAD investigated whether these methods could be adapted to semi-automatic audio description and subtitling to improve accessibility.
Professor emerita Liisa Tiittula participated in this project.