Faculty of Baltic and Finnish Philology and Culture

From Russian into Finnish and vice versa – translation in a multicultural environment

The project is a joint project of the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland, and the Faculty of Finnish and Baltic Languages and Cultures of the Petrozavodsk State University. The general aim of the proposed research is to generate knowledge based on empirical research for the operationalization of the theory of foreignization and domestication (Lawrence Venuti 1995;1996) in translation studies. The starting point is that Finnish and Russian ways of writing informative, social and political texts as well as the forms of everyday communication are different, and the translator needs to decide how these differences should be dealt with when rendering texts in translation to target audiences. The translator's decisions can presumably be analyzed applying the concepts of foreignization and domestication. For this purpose the analysis will make use of the corpora of translated Finnish compiled by the translation researchers of the University of Eastern Finland. In addition, a corpus of translated Finnish will be compiled at the State University of Petrozavodsk to study current Finnish language usage in Karelia and compare translated Finnish in Finland and Russia.

The research consists of three case studies: (1) Russian-Finnish linguistic and cultural contacts: translating texts on Finnish political history and foreign policy into Finnish and contemporary Finnish journalistic texts into Russian; (2) Audiovisual translation and the mutual effect of different forms (dubbing, subtitling) on one another; (3) Markers of difference between translations into Finnish in Finland and Karelia. The study will cover both the level of political and ideological texts as well as everyday language use (audiovisual translation). The results can be applied in developing research and training in translation between Finnish and Russian, especially in Russia, where research in this language pair is limited. The corpus of translations into Finnish will be applied to study the present state of Finnish language use in Karelia.

The research project involves two post-doc researchers at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu campus: Hannu Kemppanen and Jukka Mäkisalo, and a doctoral student Alexandra Belikova, and at Petrozavodsk State University three senior lecturers: Jevgeny Bogdanov, Ljubov Kolomainen and Marianne Nissinen, and three lecturers: Svetlana Korobeynikova, Anna Petrova and Anna Lenina. Project directors are Docent Marja Jänis (Joensuu) and Docent Tamara Starshova (Petrozavodsk). Duration of the project: 2009-2011.