World Translation Center provides professional Finnish translation services for English to Finnish and Finnish to English. We can also translate Finnish to and from over 130 other languages, including all the principal languages of Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East and a number of African languages, at affordable rates.
Our Finnish professionals have the ability to provide translation for any project you might have, including marketing materials, technical, financial, legal and medical documents, websites and software. Our experienced project managers will match your project with a translator team appropriate for the field of expertise required. Each individual linguist works solely in his or her own mother tongue and within his or her field of expertise guaranteeing not only quality translation, but proper localization at the same time. After each document is translated, it will be edited and proofread by an additional professional translator to ensure highest possible quality.
We also provide transcription, video recording and subtitling services. Should you need to have an existing video dubbed, a commercial narrated or a telephone system recorded, our native Finnish speakers are available to furnish expert voiceover services.
We pride ourselves in delivering high quality cost-effective services, whether your project is small or large, simple or highly complex.
Finnish Information
Finnish is the official language of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. It is also spoken by people of Finnish origin in countries like Norway, Estonia, Russia and Canada.
Finnish Language Facts
Finnish (suomi) is a Finno-Ugric language, part of the Uralian family.
Until 1809, Finland was a part of Sweden with Swedish as official language. Starting in 1863, the Finnish language could be used along with Swedish when communicating with authorities. In 1892 Finnish became an official language and gained a status comparable to that of Swedish. Nowadays both Finnish and Swedish coexist in Finland as official languages.
Finnish first appeared as written text during the 16th century and the first piece of Finnish literature was a translation of the New Testament by Michael Agricola.
Finnish is a synthetic language: it uses suffixes to express grammatical relations and also to derive new words. Contemporary spoken Finnish has started to move away from synthetic expressions and to useanalytic ones.
There are two distinct groups of dialects in Finland: the Western dialects (spoken in Finland Proper and Satakunta) and the Eastern dialects which consist of two subgroups (Savonian dialects spoken in Savo and nearby areas, and the South-Eastern dialects spoken now only in South Karelia). The dialects are entirely mutually intelligible and distinguished from each other by only minor changes in vowels, diphthongs and rhythm. For translation and recording we recommend using a neutral Finnish.
Some specific grammatical features of Finnish:
There is no definite or indefinite article. In speech, some pronouns or other words are sometimes used in an article-like manner.
There is no grammatical gender. Even the third person singular pronoun corresponds to both he and she.
There is no direct counterpart of passive verb forms.
The word corresponding to the English not, behaves as a verb, inflected according to the subject person.
Questions that require a yes or no answer are normally formed so that the verb is at the beginning and has the suffix -ko or -kö (e.g. Rakastaako Pete Annaa?). In answering such a question, the originally Finnish way (now often replaced by just kyllä for ‘yes’ and ei for ‘no’) is to say either the verb or the negation verb in an appropriate form, in this case rakastaa or ei.
Ownership or possession expressed by the verb have in English is expressed by using verb corresponding to English be and putting the logical subject into a case ending with -lla or -llä.
Writing Finnish
Finnish is based on the Latin alphabet
The letters in blue are only used in names and foreign loanwords
The letter G appears in native Finnish words in combination with N as ng [ŋ]
Before unvoiced consonants, b = [p], d = [t], f = [f], g = [k] and h = [x]
c = [k] when it appears before a, o and u, and [s] when in front of e, i, y, ä and ö
Stress always falls on the first syllable of words.
Vowels and consonants can be short (written with one letter), or long (written with two letters).
