Finnish

Finnish translation services

Classification

Indo-European > Germanic

Script

Roman

Speakers

5 million

Official Language

Finland

Other Names

Also spoken

Estonia, Sweden

Interesting Fact

The Finnish Names Act (Nimilaki) requires that the first name given to a baby must comply with a Finnish naming tradition. Some of the recent accepted names were Raparperi (rhubarb) for girls and Kielo (lily of valley) for boys, but Pääsky (swallow) was rejected for boys, because it didn’t sound like a boy’s name.

Profile

Finnish is mainly spoken in Finland, with notable populations of speakers of Finnish (or its dialects) in Sweden, Norway, Russia and Estonia. It is quite popular to learn Finnish as a second language in Estonia, as the two are similar (both are from the Uralic language group) but with distinct differences.

Language length
Finnish tends to be about 10-15% shorter than English. It is full of long compound words and there are no single letter words.

Major Punctuation Differences
Without getting into the real nitty-gritty, Finnish punctuation largely follows the same rules as in English, with a few notable exceptions to watch for when checking a Finnish translation:

Commas: Are used instead of decimal point in numbers.  For example, 345.75 euros would be 345,75 euros.

Capitalization: Just as in English, every sentence starts with a capital and names are capitalized. Interestingly however, names of holidays (e.g. Christmas = joulu) aren’t capitalized.

 

For more information contact us here: Finnish Translation Services.

Services offered for this language

Translation services / Transcreation / Subtitling / Localization / Adaptation / Copywriting / Authoring / Proofreading / Revision / Editing / Translation quality assurance / Terminology / Linguistic validation / Glossary creation / Dubbing / Voice-overs / Transcription / Typesetting / Simultaneous interpreting / Consecutive interpreting / Conference interpreting / Telephone interpreting / Public service interpreting / Interpreting equipment hire / Foreign language consulting

Need help with Finnish or some more advice?

Back to top