Translation of Finnish colorative verbs to English : Results of SALAMA and Google Translate compared

• Main Author: Hurskainen, Arvi
• Other Authors: Department of Languages
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: 6121 Languages; 113 Computer and information sciences; karelian
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/574336

Finnish language has a peculiar way to define in detail the action that the basic verb expresses. Such structures are called colorative expressions. Because English does not have corresponding structures, the translation cannot be conducted using routine methods. Colorative verb structures are composed of the basic verb that is always in infinitive form, and of the specifying verb that inflect according to need. These two verbs are always immediately after each other, in this order. Because the structure is constant, the isolation of these structures as multiword expressions is fairly simple. The translation, on the other hand, is often problematic simply because English does not have corresponding structures. Colorative verbs are mostly used in dialects that do not have written form, although they also appear in standard Finnish to some extent. It is not easy to find such structures in text corpora. Therefore, I have used my own knowledge of Finnish colloquial speech, and also of the Savo-Karelian dialect, that I have learned in early childhood. The formation of colorative verb structures is rather productive, and no fixed list of such constructions can be produced. We will study the translation process by using 141 test sentences, each of which contains one of the colorative verb structures. Most colorative verbs can also be used alone without the main verb. The speech context reveals to which action the colorative verb refers to. I have also made a test with sentences, where the main verb was omitted and only the colorative verb was retained. Both sentence types were translated with SALAMA and Google Translate. Translation results are compared in tables 1-4.