Pääsuke

An Estonian male who has been living in Finland since 2006. My Finnish proficiency is C2, or native-like proficiency. Of course, I will probably never reach the same level of knowledge of small nuances and stylistic meanings that a Finnish-born speaker has, but I'm working on that all the time.

I have a BA in English Philology (read: Language and Literature), and I will start my studies in the MA programme soon. However, I do not claim to be omniscient when it comes to questions related to English. With languages, it's a lifelong learning process.

I originally created my first account on 23rd April 2016 – I consider this my anniversary – called Translationist, which I then renamed to Pääsuke, or 'Swallow'. I left LT, that is, removed my account, on 3rd May, 2018 because I was having a difficult period in life, but re-created my account on the same day. On my old account I had around 360 translations.

I like punk, rock, indie, EDM (mostly chillstep) and all the random songs that I stumble upon and think sound good. Did I mention I like Irish songs? Well, I do.

One of my favourite bands is Haloo Helsinki and one of my favourite artists is Amy Macdonald.

I love Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

Personal quote: A mediocre translator thinks they know a language, a good translator knows they cannot ever fully know a language.

Funny quote: "We don't know how to rhyme, but damn we try" (Lady Gaga in "Always Remember Us This Way")

Unlisted languages I have learnt (in the order of proficiency): Swedish (in school), German (in school), Chinese (two courses)

What translating has taught me:

1. There is a word for every thing and phenomenon. If not in your language, then in another language. Hence if you say "there's no word for it", you need to do some digging around on the net (or in the library.)

2. Don't fall prey to negative interference. The phenomenon means that people are prone to using the structure found in their native language when translating things. Be aware of the phenomenon and it will be easier to avoid it. Of course, there is also positive interference, which makes learning some structures easier in your target language.

3. This is pretty much repeating the second point, but be aware that if you say something using an X construction, this is probably not the case in the target language. Use parenthesis in your Google search to find out the exact wording of a phrase. You can search for "a fast horse" and see how many hits you get. When you search for "a quick horse", you will get more hits because that is the correct expression. In other words, the word 'horse' collocates, that is, appears together with the word 'quick'. By the same logic, you see 'fast' and 'car' together. Of course you can use the parenthesis search-method for other kinds of phrases as well.

4. There are some fixed phrases that cannot be changed, they must be written the way you see them: take for example 'salt and pepper', and 'black and white' (or why not even 'mac and cheese'): if you change the word order, they just seem weird. The fixed word order is especially true for idioms: 'it's raining cats and dogs', but not the other way around.

All the songs that I have come across thanks to LT:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3P6NdbEtu0nQugYGB6XkxL?si=bR8BkEnSQUik...

PS I know that some of my 'poetic' translations may sound silly, but at least they are singable. So when my translations say 'Poetic', it usually means they are singable as well, but I don't want to add the tag 'Singable', just in case they aren't easy to sing along to after all. Most of them aren't equirhytmic, but the total number of syllables per line usually adds up. I find translations like that better, because all a literal translation does is tell the content of the lyrics, but the translation itself is not a work of art, like the original lyrics are. So my aim is to try and create something at least resembling 'art'.