Kääntäjät, koulutus ja kansanvalistus

Translator training in Finland was recently celebrating its 40th anniversary. Training is not a oneway process, though; translators, too, have been training and educating ordinary readers throughout the nearly five hundred years of Finland’s literary history. Tasks such as selecting and putting together material to be translated, adapting it to Finnish environment and needs, or explaining the many strange or difficult phenomena and issues for the readers, have always been as central intranslators’ work as translation itself. Furthermore, translators have created new vocabulary and participated in the discussions on developing or standardizing written language. In this article, I will discuss the translators’ different roles and focus on cultural mediation through translators’ footnotes. The practice of annotation has not been widely researched, strangely enough: it is a rich field of insights for the study of translators’ agency and visibility, among other things.