How Expert Finnish Translation Can Boost Your Startup Growth
Finland has created a unique ecosystem for startups to attract investment and thrive, making it a favorable market for international growth of a new business. The specific features of the Finnish language may pose a challenge to your expansion unless you place your localization project in the hands of professional translators.
Finnish Startups Scene
The stable economic situation in Finland is a favorable ground for startup growth in the country. According to the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2018, Helsinki startup ecosystem is recognized globally and artificial intelligence, gaming, and health and life science are among the top three sectors for development.
On top of that, Helsinki is host to some of Europe’s leading startup events such as Slush and Arctic15. The country also benefits of being home to the happiest people, according to the World Happiness Report 2018 and supporting one of the leading education systems in the world.
Entrepreneurship itself is deeply rooted in Finland and FocusEconomics contributors expect the stable economic growth to continue in 2020 as well.
The overall business atmosphere in the country creates a welcoming market for startups looking to expand globally that can offer competitive products and services, especially such presented in the mother language of the 5.5 million potential consumers.
What Makes Finnish Translation Unique As a Service?
Finnish is considered one of the hardest languages to learn by foreigners, which is due to some of its specific features. The reputation of a hard nut to crack may put off many companies from including Finnish into their localization strategy.
Using free online translation tools such as Google translate is also not an option for budget-constrained startups. This is due to the fact that the quality of machine translation into Finnish is much worse compared to more popular combinations like English-Spanish or English-German, for example.
So, what is the right approach in this case?
Finnish is a rare and challenging language and your startup can only benefit by using professional Finnish translation services. If you want to develop your business in Finland, offering a website translated and localized for the Finnish customers will facilitate your brand recognition and promote customer loyalty.
The conclusion is that your startup will have a significant competitive advantage by offering localized content to its Finnish customers. To achieve accuracy and consistency, though, it is necessary to use professional Finnish translation services, because:
- The Finnish language has no gender, which will require a specific translation approach when the source language differentiates between genders and the content to be translated evolves around a masculine or feminine vibe. Depending on the source language, this peculiarity can play either a significant or no role at all in translation.
- Finnish has a number of dialects with Eastern and Western being quite different from one another but this rarely plays a significant impact on translation as usually it is translated into “written Finnish.” Still, for certain content that distinction may matter, so you need to make sure that your market penetration strategy will not be affected by the “dialect” of your Finnish translator.
- In Finland there is a written language used for websites and official publications that differs from the spoken language with its many dialects. Therefore, it is necessary to hire a professional who can translate your content in accordance with its purpose and target audience. There is a difference between the content on your official website and a marketing motto or incentive meant to bring you close to the people of Finland.
- Finnish has a lot of culture-specific words denoting notions and conditions that are unique for the country and only a professional translator who is a native-speaker can find the right connotation to present the mood your original content brings.
- Finnish often has quite a different approach to communicating ideas and hence a too direct translation from English or other language sounds clumsy. If the cultural differences of the language are not taken into account, it becomes clearly visible to a Finn that the translation is of bad quality and hence it is not trustworthy.
- Finnish uses modification and inflections of nouns for case as well as extensive agglutination instead of prepositions as many other languages do, such as English or Spanish. As a result, there will usually be less words in Finnish than in the source text but, on the other hand, the words are also longer. This is something that needs to be taken into account in localization projects involving a website or a user interface layout, for example.
The combination of these factors necessitates the use of professional translators if you want your Finnish localization process to be a success and pave your road to robust ROI.
SEO Challenges In Finnish—How Professional Localization Services Can Help?
Another important aspect of the Finnish translation is the search engine optimization in Finland, which is a process a bit different than SEO in English.
A language that uses a lot of suffixes and long words is difficult for Google to cope with. You cannot simply translate your English keywords into Finnish and expect the same SERP results.
The support of an experienced translation agency with knowledge of SEO is invaluable for the right positioning of your startup in the Finnish market. You will receive proper localization services to guarantee that your content is optimized and “speaks” the language of search engines while remaining consumer-friendly.
In Top 3 SEO Challenges in Finland and How To Master Them Jonathan Björkskog, Head of SEO & Co-founder of Genero Digital Agency, says that the biggest challenge in Finnish SEO is that most search engine optimization tools are not made for the Finnish market, do not include any Finnish words, or even Google.fi in the toolbox.
That is why the professional support of a translation agency experienced in localization becomes a necessity if you want to take over the frozen land. The level of cooperation with your Finnish translators along with their knowledge and skills can make or break your startup efforts for external growth.
In order to make sure that you have selected the right translation partner, check out our free white paper about the “40 Questions to Expect from a Translation Agency.”
Hi, I’m David. Everyone loves your translation blog, and I personally find it to be quite helpful. I also work as a translator.