I recently travelled to Finland, the country where I grew up, on family matters and while I was there I stayed in touch with the outside world (literally, my parents live in a remote village) with the help of a well-known social networking site.
A while back I saw that the site in question, i.e. Facebook, was advertising that they needed users to help translate their site into other languages. This is apparently called crowd-sourcing, which means Facebook would use volunteers from the internet public to translate their website into all the languages of the world – sans monnaie.
What I hadn’t anticipated was that as soon as I logged on to Facebook abroad my page would automatically load in a foreign language. However, it slightly surprised me that my Facebook page automatically loaded in Finnish. Although from Finland, my first language is not Finnish and for anyone out there wondering: Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, neither bearing any similarities to each other whatsoever.
If you haven’t come across the odd but wonderful language that is Finnish, the following might explain why I felt disorientated at first. The longest acceptable Finnish word is apparently: Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas.
According to the Finnish edition of the Guinness Book of Records, it translates approximately to: Technical Warrant Officer Trainee specialized in Aircraft Jet Engines. Hmmm... And it’s not the only example. What do you think of this:
Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhänkin?
I had to look this one up and some sources say it means something like “not even when taking into account his/her/its way/ability/tendency of not disorganizing” but people seem to disagree on the exact meaning for some reason. Not your daily sort of words but they show you the nature of the Finnish language, nonetheless.
But my main concern was that if I had to navigate Facebook in another language while abroad, why was I not offered the opportunity to use Facebook in Swedish? Has Finland’s bilingualism been overlooked by Facebook? Has this happened in other bilingual/multilingual countries? Comments, please.
