NEaT – Page 20 – Nordic Editors and Translators ry

English as a Lingua Nordica: An English of our own

Seminar on English Use in the Nordics

Is the English that we use here in the Nordics different from other Englishes? How and why do we use English in the Nordics? English as a Lingua Nordica opens up discussion on topics on the English that is spoken in Nordic countries. This first seminar will focus on the English in actual use and its controversies, based on current research in the field at the universities of Helsinki and Turku.

The seminar will be presented online streaming from NCP’s premises in Kaisaniemi, Helsinki. Each speaker will be followed by a question and answer session, which all participants are welcome to join in.
Ian Mac Eochagáin and Judi Rose will represent NEaT in the live stream.

Link to webinar stream: the link will be posted on the seminar’s Facebook page here.

After the seminar, NEaT will host a Zoom session at 18:00 for participants in the seminar or for those who would like to hear about it. Virve Juhola and Julie Uusinarkaus will lead a discussion of points raised during the afternoon sessions.

Join the after session Zoom Meeting

Date: 14 April 2021
Time: 16:00 to 19:00

Schedule:
Livestreamed from the Nordic Culture Point
16:00 Welcome by Nordic Culture Point and NEaT

16:10 Elizabeth Peterson: The price of being “right”: English language in the Nordic Countries

16:45 Pauliina Peltonen: Second language speech fluency across languages: Insights from the MultiFluency project

17:20
Johan Strang: “Hjælp! Vi forstår hinanden ikke!”: The English language and the Nordic community

Hosted by NEaT

18:00 Zoom meetup and discussion on the topics of the day

Topic: ELN Talk and Meet

Speakers and Topics

Johan Strang, Centre for Nordic Studies, University of Helsinki

“Hjælp! Vi forstår hinanden ikke!”: The English language and the Nordic community

Recent studies suggest that the Nordics have increasing trouble understanding each other’s languages. English is replacing the Scandinavian languages in both professional and private communication. Is the English language ruining the Nordic community, or should we embrace it as a convenient and more inclusive tool for intra-Nordic communication?

Johan Strang is Associate Professor at the Centre for Nordic Studies, and an Academy of Finland Research Fellow (2019-2024) with a project studying the reinvention of Norden during the post-Cold War period. His research interests include Nordic politics, society and history. He has published and taught on Nordic cooperation, democracy and political history, and also rather extensively on Nordic intellectual and philosophical history of the 20th century. In his ongoing Academy of Finland Research Fellowship project Norden since the End of History (NORDEND) he will examine the redefinition of Norden and Nordicity after the end of the Cold War. He is also engaged in the programme Neoliberalism in the Nordics led by Professor Jenny Andersson in Uppsala and financed by Riksbankens Jublieumsfond.

Pauliina Peltonen, University of Turku

Second language speech fluency across languages: Insights from the MultiFluency project

How does the individual speaking style in our native language influence the speech fluency in a second language? How do cross-linguistic differences affect speech fluency in different first and second languages? These questions are central for the project “Fluency across Multilingual Speakers” (MultiFluency), which focuses on Finnish university students’ speech fluency in Finnish, Swedish, and English. The results provide insights into the influence of individual speaking style on L2 speech fluency as well as cross-linguistic differences in speech fluency. During the talk, I will also discuss the practical implications of the findings for language experts.

Dr. Pauliina Peltonen is a project researcher in the Department of English at the University of Turku. Peltonen is an applied linguist, whose main field of study is second language (L2) learning and L2 speech fluency. She is also interested in L2 interaction and multimodality. Peltonen is a member of the fluency research group FlowLang and a member of the executive team for Leala, The Centre for Language Learning Research at the University of Turku. During 2017–2020, Peltonen was a member of the executive board for the Finnish Association for Applied Linguistics (AFinLA) and acted as vice-chair during 2019–2020.

Elizabeth Peterson, University of Helsinki

The price of being “right”: English language in the Nordic Countries

English skills in the Nordic countries are considered among the best in Europe, and, in fact, in the world. This is a demonstrable fact. Yet in Finland, there is frequent public discourse–even disparaging accounts–of the embarrassing English skills of, for example, elected officials. What is the price of having such high standards for the use of English? This talk explores the benefits and burdens of such attitudes, with some surprises about conflicting views of equality.

Elizabeth Peterson has a PhD in Linguistics. She has been a University Lecturer of English Linguistics in Finland since 2004, and for the past 12 years at the University of Helsinki. She teaches and researches, among other things, language attitudes and ideologies. Her book on the topic of attitudes about English was published (open access) by Routledge last year.

Workshop: Peer approaches to editing: “Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine”

Wednesday 10th March, 4–6 pm

Ever wonder how other editors approach client texts? What choices they make? Often we get stuck in our own habits and patterns of working, and taking a peek into someone else’s editing approaches and ideas can be very beneficial for refreshing and developing our own skills. This spring Alice Lehtinen and Alyce Whipp will host an online editing workshop, briefly presenting their approaches to editing (using medical/health-related academic texts as the source material) and offering two brief paragraphs for attendees to edit and discuss in pairs during the workshop. A group reflection on how we approached the texts will conclude the session. The emphasis will not be on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ but rather on sharing, comparing and learning about how we each enter and modify another person’s text (e.g., our mindset, the considerations we make, how far we go).

Come and join us! There is no one and only way to edit, so let’s share our practices and learn from each other!

This event is for members only. To sign up, please email us at info@nordicedit.fi

We look forward to seeing you,

Alyce and Alice

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Alyce Whipp is American and has lived in Finland for 8 years. She is a final-year doctoral candidate in the University of Helsinki’s Doctoral Program of Population Health, as well as a freelance editor for UH’s Language Services for 6 years and an instructor of courses like Academic Writing and Conference Presentation. She mainly edits academic manuscripts, dissertations and grants on medical and health-related topics, as well as environmental, economic or agricultural topics.

Alice Lehtinen is half British and half Finnish and has lived in Finland for 26 years. After 11 years as inhouse Language Editor at a research institute, she set up her own editing and translation business four years ago. She mainly edits the English of Finnish researchers’ academic articles before they are sent to journals for publication, and doctoral theses. However, Alice also translates a variety of texts from Finnish to English and edits all other types of texts written in English, such as website texts, training courses, reports and funding applications.

Book review: communication for all

This book could not be more timely. Saavutettava viestintä (Accessible Communication) was published at the end of the year when the world shut down, everything closed, and everyone was expected to move their lives online. But going virtual and digital is easier for some than for others.

What if you can’t see or hear (well or at all)? What if you don’t speak or read the language (fluently)? What if you don’t have good internet, or a device you can access it with? What if you have all those things, but you’re physically or mentally not able (right now or ever) to use them? What if the resources are out there, but you can’t find them? What are your rights?

Language professionals think about some of these questions daily, but they don’t join up their thinking enough, and they don’t communicate with non-experts clearly enough. A lot of the content in this book was not new to me, but it was put together in a new way, combining theory and practice. In it, two dozen authors explain the latest research and share professional or personal experiences.

Four key areas are covered – equality and legal rights, everyday life, work, and society. The focus is on Finland, which is important for Finnish itself, not least because access to knowledge in your own language helps the development of that language. Together, the authors introduce a wide range of issues that apply much more broadly.

Accessible communication involves all the senses: sight, sound, and touch (even smell and taste). If you can’t communicate through one sense, you should be able to use another. You’ve probably seen superb sign-language interpreters in action, but did you know about haptic, hybrid, and written interpreting? In this book, accessible service users and providers share stories that need telling, which can shape policy and practice. One chapter describes a movie night for deafblind people. Another on translating recipes from English to Finnish shows how much cultural and contextual knowledge you need to communicate accessibly. Researchers on the MeMAD project offer valuable insight into accessing audiovisual content. And comic contracts were new to me, too.

As an immigrant woman who has been on the receiving end of communication about how I should integrate and learn the language, I was most interested in the chapters about this. Easy Finnish (simple language, not the same thing as plain language) was very important for me when I moved here (I’ve written about it) and still is for many.

Did you know that 7% of people in Finland speak languages other than the national ones (Finnish and Swedish?) Regrettably, even the national languages don’t have equal status in practice, and Saami, Romani, and sign language speakers don’t have the same rights. The chapters on this issue stressed the desperate need for better resources in growing minority languages too, like Somali and Arabic. English as a lingua franca is useful – NEaT members helped write the English style guide for the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office – but only to those who speak it. Accessible communication requires training interpreters, translators, and civil servants, as the book highlights so well, but immigrants (who are or could be in all those roles) need language training first. I believe that teachers of Finnish as an additional language need the same professional recognition and resources that teachers of Finnish to “native speakers” enjoy. That term in itself is loaded; a chapter on language ideologies calls for broader concepts of what constitutes a “mother tongue”.

Technologies and the humans behind them are making communication more accessible. Machine translation and crowdsourced localization are improving, and may be the only cost-effective solution, as in humanitarian crises. But the chapters on these technologies show that people write both the programmes and the text to be communicated. Those writers and programmers need to be more diverse. And they need to share their knowledge: the terminology chapter points out that that people can only use online resources like TSK ’s if they know where to find them.

This is a lot to take in – in a short review I can’t do justice to each author’s research and experience – and different readers will be more interested in different aspects of accessible communication. But Design for All means involving everyone, and this book gives you resources to to do that. Hopefully it will change the way you think, write, translate, edit, and communicate.

So get yourself a copy of Maija Hirvonen & Tuija Kinnunen (eds.) Saavutettava viestintä: Yhyeiskunnallista yhdenvertaisuutta editstämässä (Gaudeamus 2020). If you want more training, try the Finnish Centre for Easy Language, Selkokeskus, or join the Finnish Design for All network, coordinated by Avaava. If you’re serious about this issue, why not take the Accessibility in a Digital Society study module (20 ECTS) at Tampere University: the first course starts in March 2021.

Kate Sotejeff-Wilson translates, copywrites and edits for academics at KSWtranslations, facilitates Ridge Writing Retreats, and is vice chair of NEaT.

NEaTUps

NEaT members meet regularly in person and online to socialise and exchange notes as language professionals. These are member-only events, so check your email for the precise details, including meeting links to online events.

Full Moon Chat

28 January 2021, 18.00 EET, Zoom

Our first chat and quiz in November was such a boost into the atmosphere that we decided to do it again. Matthew Paines is hosting another chat later this month under the full moon on January 28. We’ll have a quiz about Lady Moon, and it’s sure to be a blast!

Search your email for “NEaTup on Zoom in January” for the meeting link, ID and passcode.

Past events:

Bonfire Night Chat

On Thursday, grab your favorite hot beverage and tune in for our NEaT-Up Online: Burning Down the House chat

Thursday, 5 November 2020, 19.00 EET, Zoom

Welcome to a bonfire night online meetup on 5 November. We’ll chat about the heated topics of the day or any burning issues you have. Your red-hot host, Matthew Paines, will put everyone on the hot seat.