Finnish has been rated one of the most challenging languages in the world for English speakers to learn. I can´t blame the frustrated language learns. Even we native speakers struggle with endless language rules, infinite suffixes and many, many exceptions to the existing grammar rules. Just when you thought you have it all covered, someone comes and says: “Actually… in this context the word X should be spelt differently as here it means Y”. Enough to drive poor students crazy. Everything learned by heart is useless.

Finnish is… different

Finnish is an extremely synthetic language, where both (just to make it more fun) nouns and verbs have many inflectional types. It´s basically impossible to give a strict rule for a particular grammatical point. Then there are differences between conversational Finnish and written Finnish, yeay! Something that might be completely acceptable in informal conversation is not so in written. The verb conjugation is freer in spoken Finnish, and consonant gradation not that easily detectable. In both cases, though you need to know the case system inside out and understand how the pronouns are declined.

What if I´m not Finnish?

After hearing all the horror stories about Finnish grammar, you might wonder, how can you make sure that the Finnish content or translations your company has ordered are good? Excellent question, Watson! As Sherlock Holmes would have said, it´s all about “data!data!data!”. Ideally, of course, there would be a person in your organization with remarkable Finnish skills to check the result, but if you don´t possess a unicorn, look at the traffic. How many clicks you get? How much time people (here read Finns) spend on your site? Does content convert to clicks or actual orders? Where this traffic comes from?

There are plenty of tools online to track your site´s visitors´ behaviour, and if the numbers are low, it might have to do with text quality. Especially if you have already made the page visible and it´s listed on Google. This is the moment when you call – not ghostbusters – but impartial language agency and kindly ask them to have a quick look at your site and ask what could be improved. Trust is a beautiful thing, but it´s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to online marketing or internal communication.