This article explores how Finnish professional translators perceive the status of the profession in general as opposed to the status of their own work, and how these status perceptions are affected by various factors. We first consider the multiple meanings of status, summarize previous empirical research and introduce the Finnish context, and then go on to statistically analyze survey data consisting of Finnish business, literary and audiovisual translators' responses (n=450). The analysis reveals that the respondents rank translator status in general as middling (as in previous research) but, at the same time, see the status of their own work as high. Further analysis indicates that while status perceptions of the profession in general are mostly not linked to the respondents' working conditions or job satisfaction, perceptions of the status of one's own work fluctuate more. Interestingly, the respondents' backgrounds and qualifications fail to produce statistically significant differences. Moreover, the role of some factors varies among business, literary and audiovisual translators. Distinguishing between the status of the profession in general and the status of the respondents' work thus appears to be important for a better understanding of status and may even partly explain why a middling-status profession nevertheless fosters satisfied translators.

This study explores how the process of translating relates to other types of writing processes by comparing pause lengths preceding syntactic units (words, phrases and clauses) in two types of writing task, a monolingual text production and a translation. It also discusses the grounds for interpreting pause length as a refl ection of the cognitive demands of the writing process. The data was collected from 18 professional translators using the Translog keystroke logging software (Jakobsen/Schou 1999). Each subject wrote two texts: an expository text in Finnish and a translation from English into Finnish (Immonen 2006: 316-319). Firstly, phrase boundary pauses were categorised according to type, function and length of phrase. All three features correlate with pause length. On average, predicate phrases are preceded by short pauses, adpositional phrases by long pauses, and pauses preceding noun phrases grow with the length of the phrase. These fi ndings suggest that the processing of the predicate begins before written production of the clause is started, whereas noun phrases and adpositional phrases are processed during writing. Secondly, pauses preceding clauses were categorised with respect to clause type. In monolingual text production, pauses preceding subordinate clauses are on average shorter than those leading to main clauses. In translation, pauses preceding subordinate and main clauses are almost the same length. It seems therefore that, in translation, the main clause and subordinate clause are processed separately despite the fact that the subordinate clause functions as a syntactic unit within the main clause.

This research focuses on the type and proportion of the revisions made by translators during target text production. Eighteen professional translators used the keyboard logging software Translog while carrying out a translation task on a computer. As Translog registers and displays all keyboard activity in relation to time, all the revisions in the log files can also be identified and counted. The revisions were categorised as revisions of typing errors, revisions of literal translation and other revisions. Typing error revisions account for 51.5%, literal translation revisions for 20.5% and other revisions for 28.0%. If typing error revisions are ignored, literal translation revisions account for 42.3%. Revisions of literal translation were observed at all linguistic levels and in all translators’ log files, irrespective of the quality of their final translations. These results suggest that literal translation constitutes an integral element of the translation process and can perhaps be considered as a strategy to expand the translator’s working memory. The results also give support to the Monitor Model of translation, which maintains that literal rendering is the default strategy of target text production.

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It has been shown in earlier research on comparable corpora that translated language differs from non-translated language in its use of the linguistic resources of the target language. For example, language-specific or “unique” items have been shown to manifest significantly lower frequencies in translated Finnish. There are reasons to expect, however, that subtitle language might differ from other varieties of translated language in its exploitation of such cohesive devices that contribute to brevity and conciseness. It is now possible to test this hypothesis on a subtitle corpus of 100 million words which we have recently compiled from the subtitle files of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (FBC/YLE). The clitic particles and other short cohesive elements are an excellent case in point for testing the hypothesis. This paper will report on our preliminary findings of the cohesive devices as they are used in subtitled Finnish of the FBC corpus. Our results suggest that the “unique” cohesive particles manifest even greater frequencies in subtitles than in varieties of non-translated language. Thus it seems that subtitles do not conform to some of the patterns found in previous research on translated language.

Artikkelin aiheena on tapaustutkimus, jossa sosiolingvististä reaaliaikamenetelmää sovelletaan vuonna 1900 syntyneen rajakarjalaistaustaisen naisen puhekieleen. Seuruun kohde syntyi eteläkarjalan puhuma-alueella Venäjän Porajärvellä, mistä hän muutti 17-vuotiaana Raja-Karjalan puolelle Ilomantsin Liusvaaraan. Toisen maailmansodan jälkeen hän asui nykyisessä Ilomantsissa savolaismurteiden alueella. Aineistona on noin seitsemän tuntia arkistoituja haastatteluja 18 vuoden ajalta (1960–1978), jolloin haastateltava oli jo eläkeikäinen. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan 13:n äänne- ja muoto-opillisen piirteen edustusta kvantitatiivisen  variaationanalyysin keinoin. Tavoitteena on selvittää, miten karjalaisina piirteet ovat säilyneet, onko edustuksessa havaittavissa ajallisia taitekohtia ja mistä mahdollinen vaihtelu voisi selittyä. Kaikissa tutkittavissa piirteissä on vaihtelua karjalaisten ja suomalaisten varianttien kesken koko tarkastelujakson ajan. Tilastollisesti merkitseviä eroja syntyy erityisesti vuoden 1964 näytteen suomalaistumisesta sekä vuosina 1975–1978 karjalaisuuden vahvistumisesta. Vuoden 1964 suomalaistuminen koskee varsinkin fonologisia piirteitä, joihin puhujan kontrollin voi olettaa kohdistuvan herkemmin kuin sijamuotoihin tai verbintaivutukseen. A real-time study of a Border Karelian idiolect The article focuses on a case study in which the sociolinguistic real-time method is applied to the spoken language of a female informant, born in Border Karelia in 1900. She was born in Porajärvi, Russia, which belonged to the South Karelian speaking area. When she was seventeen, she moved to the village of Liusvaara in Ilomantsi, Border Karelia. After the Second World War, she settled in present-day Ilomantsi, which is situated in the Finnish Savo dialect region. The material in this study consists of ca. seven hours of interviews, archived between 1960 and 1978, when the informant was already of retirement age. In this study, the variation of thirteen phonological and morphological features is quantitatively analysed. The aim of the study is to explore how these features have retained aspects of the Karelian language, whether there are temporal turning points in the representation of these features, and how such potential change can be explained. During the whole period of eighteen years, there is variation between Karelian and Finnish with regard to all of the features involved. In 1964, the significant differences concerned the change towards Finnish but later on, successive samples show changes towards Karelian. The change towards Finnish in 1964 notably involved phonological features which are presumably controlled by the speaker more easily than cases or conjugations. Temporal variation may be explained by the speaker’s phases of life: particularly in the 1960s, contact with speakers of the Savo dialect increased. As she aged, the informant returned more markedly to her native Karelian dialect. The study supports previous sociolinguistic findings regarding the propensity for idiolectal change throughout a person’s lifespan, and suggests that in old age speakers often return to the dialect of their youth.