Tampere as a translation space

Abstract

This article looks at the municipality of Tampere (Swedish: Tammerfors), an industrial inland city in southern Finland. The patterns of multilingual interaction within this geographic space are traced, paying special attention to the historical trajectories of translationality. This rereading of the history of Tampere (with particular emphasis on the period 1809–1917) focuses on translational events – that is, moments of overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers in written or spoken communicative situations in which more than one language is involved. Translational actions are found to take many forms, ranging from highly prominent and visible interpreting to everyday self-translation. What remains constant during the period under study is a sense of parallel existence of languages and mutual accommodation to the linguistic needs of a multilingual community, even in the face of conflicting interests and changing power relations.

Keywords:

• translation space
• translational action
• translationality
• multilingualism
• urban space
• history of translationality

In her recent book on cities and translation, Sherry Simon argues that “[c]ities that exhibit the seams and sutures of history have a kind of family resemblance” (2012, xix). She goes on to list a number of cities that belong to this family: Czernowitz, Vilnius, Istanbul, New Orleans, Nicosia, Beirut, Mostar, Brussels, Barcelona, Dakar, Trieste, Manila and – of course – her native Montreal, the subject of an earlier book (Simon 2006). In this article, I look at another city, or town – my hometown, Tampere, Finland – that is not world famous for its multilingual character nor notorious for its ethnic conflicts; in other words, one that is not regularly listed among the major cosmopolitan urban centres of the world.¹ The choice of this particular location, however, is not only personal, but also academically motivated. It is interesting to see whether or to what extent one can find family resemblances between urban centres of different shapes and sizes (see also Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes [2013] on the relevance of peripheries to understanding multilingualism).

Linguistic landscape researchers have taken a keen interest in the multilingual nature of contemporary cities (see e.g. Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, and Barni 2010). Similarly, Michael Cronin (2006) emphasizes the multilingual, multi-ethnic nature of contemporary urban spaces. He stresses the fact that these are first and foremost translation spaces. As Simon also argues, “there are no monolingual cities” (2012, 2). The city is a place of language contact, and it thus follows that the city is also a space for translation. Cronin (2006, 15) argues for the city as the locus of micro-cosmopolitan analysis – that is, for cosmopolitanism from below – and he identifies the global relevance of the local, the small and the mundane. Cities may resemble one another, but they also exhibit their own “patterns of interaction”, emerging “out of their spaces and their own narrative pasts” (Simon 2012, 2). Small, mundane details of these local patterns, such as signage (on which linguistic landscape research largely focuses), can be used as clues to the linguistic ideologies of a particular location:

The linguistic landscape not only tells you in an instant where on earth you are and what languages you are supposed to know, but it […] provides a unique perspective on the coexistence and competition of different languages and their scripts, and how they interact and interfere with each other in a given place. (Backhaus 2007, 145)

In this article I will trace the patterns of interaction within the space of Tampere, with special emphasis on following the historical trajectories of translationality in this place – that is, in this porous and continuously shifting network of people and spaces (Massey 2008, 9). As I employ this term, translationality is intricately linked with particular translational events, moments of overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers in written or spoken communicative situations in which more than one language is involved. Following the classic treatise by Justa Holz-Mänttäri (1984) I call these events of intercultural and multilingual cooperation moments of “translational action” (translatorisches Handeln). However, in the historical context I am working with, I make no normative assumptions about the roles and identities of those involved in these events and in that sense I differ from Holz-Mänttäri, who operates within the field of professional translation.²

The focus here is on the period between 1809 and 1917. In 1809, Sweden lost its easternmost territory to Russia, and this present-day Finland, enlarged with reintegrated Carelian areas, was annexed to Russia as an autonomous grand duchy. Russian rule allowed for the development of nationalistic ideas and practices, and this culminated in Finnish independence in 1917. Space does not allow for a long overview of the historical background, but 1809 can be considered an “Archimedean point” in the history of Finland (Engman 2009, 9). At that moment, Finland as we know it now was first formed, together with various administrative and educational institutions that supported it, and the national identity that held it together. The Finnish language, which had until then existed in various unregulated dialect forms, was also standardized for the first time (see e.g. Paloposki 2002, 36–39). The main focus in this article is on understanding the birth of translated Tampere before and particularly during the nineteenth century, but the patterns found in its history are also brought into a dialogue with the present-day linguistic landscape of Tampere.

Methodologically, the article is based on a sociolinguistic close reading of previous historical research on the city of Tampere from the point of view of translationality (for more on this method see Lönnroth 2009, 106). Existing historical research, where the question of translation has rarely been raised as a separate issue, is reread from that perspective, looking for direct and indirect indications of translators, interpreters, translational activity and approaches and attitudes towards multilingualism.³ These historical findings are then contrasted with contemporary material that originates from a book project on translationality in present-day Tampere (Koskinen 2013a). The use of published historical research was a deliberate choice. While there also exist archival sources, biographic and literary accounts, and the histories of workers' unions and other societies, and while these can offer rich perspectives on the coexistence of languages in different areas of the city, the existing histories of Tampere allow us an overview of how things were and how the language situation evolved over time. This can serve as a basis for further, and more fine-tuned, inquiries into different facets of life in the city.

The multilingual origins of Tampere

A defining geographical feature of Tampere is the Tammerkoski Rapids that run through the city centre, connecting the lakes on both sides of Tampere. The rapids are the reason why Tampere exists; it was because of the energy resources they offered that King Gustav III of Sweden decided to establish a town there. At that time there were no more than five families living in the area, but once it was founded in 1779, the town of Tammerfors (its Swedish name) began to grow. In 1800 there were already some 500 inhabitants. Table 1 shows the development of the population of Tampere during the nineteenth century, from its very modest beginnings to growth rates that were at the time the highest in Finland. Today, Tampere is the biggest inland city in Finland, although with its 215,000 inhabitants it can still hardly be considered a metropolis.

Table 1. Population of Tampere 1780–1910. (Source: Rasila 1984, 205)

Year	Population	Year	Population
1780	181	1860	5,232
1800	463	1880	13,645
1820	956	1900	36,344
1840	1,819	1910	45,422

Tampere was from its birth a distinctly industrial town. This industrialization depended on foreign businessmen, some of whom left a lasting mark. In 1819 one James Finlayson visited Tampere. In 1820 he founded a factory by the rapids and became a Tampere inhabitant for 20 years (Hirvonen 1957, 136). History books are not very explicit about how this man, originally from Scotland but arriving in Tampere from St Petersburg, communicated with the locals. From the information available one can infer that he had a prestigious interpreter and fixer: the wealthy merchant Gustaf Lundahl “functioned as the right hand of Finlayson” (Murros 1935, 90; in some accounts the term “interpreter” is explicitly used). In numerous sources, the Lundahl residence is hailed as the epicentre of Tampere's cultural life. An overnight visit by Emperor Alexander I himself in 1819 is often considered its climax. Gustaf Lundahl is reported to have known Russian and German, and his wife Charlotta to have spoken French (e.g. Wallenius 2001, 12); it is telling that what is seen as the exceptionally wide variety of languages in this family is made much of in all accounts. It is not entirely clear between which languages the interpreting for Finlayson took place, but one source (Voionmaa 1929, 154) mentions that Lundahl also knew English. This makes sense, but another possibility is that Finlayson may have learned some Russian, as he had worked in St Petersburg for several years (ibid., 137).

Figure 1. The main entrance to Finlayson still dominates the view in the city centre. (Photo: Lauri Hietala)

From its very modest beginnings, the Finlayson Cotton Mill eventually became a multilingual city within the city. Most of the workers were Finnish-speakers from the rural areas around Tampere, but most of the foremen, engineers and skilled workers came from abroad, mainly from England (Hirvonen 1957, 138–140). Although there were numerous other workshops and small factories by the rapids, the Finlayson Mill was dominant. It grew to be the biggest factory in Finland, and then in Scandinavia as a whole (for figures, see Voionmaa 1929, 191). At that time the employer was held responsible for his staff. Finlayson was a devout Quaker who had the will to do more than the bare minimum. The mill had workers' housing built and supported the establishment of a school, a hospital, a bank, a lending library and a small church. All these operated in more than one language: mainly in Finnish and Swedish, but English and German were also used. Finlayson's social programme was later continued by his followers, the German-speakers Wilhelm von Nottbeck and Ferdinand Uhde (ibid., 184–186).⁴

English-speaking newcomers were at first linguistically isolated, but religion functioned as a social lubricant. The Finnish workers held Pietist meetings in the home of a Juho Eriksson, and the English, most of whom were Methodists, joined these meetings, saying their prayers in their own language (Hirvonen 1957, 141). It is said that every day James Finlayson visited the factory orphanage to read the Bible in English (for Finnish-speaking children), and “this was then translated” (ibid., 137). The story does not reveal who the translator was. History books do mention Katarina Ekblom, a linguistically adept young woman born in the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands who came to work as a maid for the Finlayson family. We are told that she “learned to master the Swedish, Finnish and English languages, and she could thus translate English missionary journals” (Rasila 1984, 617). Perhaps Finlayson's biblical readings were translated by young nursemaids who, like Miss Ekblom, had been able to pick up the languages around them.

Tampere/Tammerfors: A dual city

When Tampere was first founded, the region, along with most of contemporary Finland, was a part of Sweden. It is little wonder that Swedish was the language of all official matters, education and business alike, and Finnish was used mainly at church and in the lower levels of administration. However, 80% of the population spoke only Finnish – although few of them wrote it (Engman 2009, 230). After 1809, when Sweden was forced to hand its easternmost regions over to Russia as a result of losing the Swedish-Russian War, Swedish continued to dominate. Russian was only beginning to develop into a national language even in Russia. It was not the majority language of the Russian Empire, where German and French rather than Russian were spoken by the upper classes (Klinge 1997, 41). Consequently, Russian was a rare language in Finland and all existing administrative documentation in Finland was in Swedish, the language spoken by the ruling class both before and after 1809. In the beginning, the strategic plan was indeed to distance Finland from its former contacts with Sweden by allowing and even supporting the use of Finnish parallel to Russian while prohibiting the use of Swedish. In practice this proved difficult, since it was feared that banning Swedish would have equalled banning legality and civilization – the Russian rulers considered Finns and Finnish-speakers incapable of independent governance and cultural life (Engman 2009, 232–233, 242; see also McRae 1997, 27–30).

The steps for improving the status of Finnish were gradual. In 1863 an imperial language edict ordered that Finnish be made an official language within the next 20 years, on an equal footing with Swedish. In fact, this was not achieved until 1902 (Engman 2009, 243). Throughout the nineteenth century, Swedish remained the dominant language, and even now it retains the status of an official language in Finland. Table 2 shows the reported mother tongues in Tampere in 1880 (the first year the Statistical Yearbook of Finland included this information). For comparison, Table 3 shows the same data for 2011.

Table 2. Languages in Tampere in 1880. (Source: Suomenmaan tilastollinen vuosikirja 1881, 13.)

	Finnish	Swedish	Russian	German	Others	Total
Population	12,568	1,027	24	74	57	13,750

Table 3. Most widely spoken languages (other than Finnish) in Tampere in 2011. (Source: City of Tampere 2011.)

Language	Population
Other than Finnish (total)	11,919
Russian	2,342
Swedish	1,083
Arabic	931
Estonian	640
English	616
Chinese	469
Kurdi	412
Somali	326
Dari	305
Persian	303

As Tables 2 and 3 indicate, the Tampere region has always been predominantly Finnish-speaking. In the nineteenth century, Swedish was spoken by the elite and occupied a central role in the linguistic landscape of the city. Although geographically there are a number of clear demarcating lines in the centre – especially the rapids dividing the city east to west – Tampere has never been a geographically divided city. Rather, throughout the nineteenth century, it was a linguistically and socially divided city. Although, as mentioned above, there were numerous languages used in the city, most of which were spoken among the upper echelons of the society, these played a minor role. The division was fundamentally between Swedish and Finnish, making Tampere, or Tammerfors, a decisively dual city (Simon 2012, 20; see also Engman [2009, 231] on this same duality across the country). Language and social class were closely intertwined, and the classes were so distinct that it has even been described as a caste system (Rasila 1984, 41; see also Varto 1935). In general terms, Swedish was the language of power, prestige and upward social movement, while Finnish was the language of the uneducated masses.⁵

The system has been described as such a natural state of affairs that it was rarely challenged (Varto 1935, 160). In Varto's memoirs of his childhood as a member of the Finnish-speaking working class towards the end of the nineteenth century, one can, however, find a number of illustrative anecdotes of attempts at breaking that pattern, at living a “translated life”. For example, Varto explains that workers, who were Finns from the rural areas and did not speak any Swedish, tried to imitate this socially prestigious language in their gatherings by singing popular songs in broken Swedish (ibid., 161–162). Acquiring some knowledge of Swedish was prudent, since even if a skilled Finnish-speaking worker could get promoted in his or her job, social promotion was dependent on the self-translation of the entire family into Swedish. The family no longer socialized with workers' families but tried to rise into the circles of merchants, “whose daughters were called fröökynä [broken form for fröken, miss] and whose wives were called frouva [broken form for fru, madame]”, by attempting to use Swedish in their everyday speech as the merchants did (ibid., 160).

Tammerforssvenskan, the Tampere variant of Swedish, has been defined as the language of the Swedish-speaking population living in the Tampere area (Lönnroth 2009, 118). Lönnroth stresses that his definition is tentative and preliminary as this variant has not been widely studied. He lists bilingualism, language contacts and code-switching as features affecting the Swedish of inland areas of Finland, including Tampere (ibid., 120). It seems evident that another related characteristic of Tammerforssvenskan is indeed the predominance of translationality. Although Swedish was the language of power, in Tampere as in Finland in general, native Swedish-speakers were always a minority. Swedish was often required of Finnish-speakers, few of whom mastered the language. They had to rely on volunteer translators and interpreters of varying skills and aptitudes, and if they did not have anyone available to translate for them, they often resorted to self-translating from their native Finnish and speaking and writing in “bad” or broken variants, “in Tampere Swedish or some other form of gibberish” (Voionmaa 1932, 282; see also Lönnroth 2009, 117).

Finns were not the only ones who needed to learn Swedish. Obviously, those coming from abroad also had the challenge of learning the local language(s). But their numbers were smaller, and their status usually higher, and many of them mastered one or several of the prestigious foreign languages, such as German, Russian or English. I have not found similar laments in the literature about their limited abilities. Those already higher up on the social ladder did not need to make efforts to learn the local language unless they chose to. For example, the wife of Wilhelm von Nottbäck, Constance Marie Elise Mengden (1824–1888), a German-speaking noblewoman, is said to have learnt Finnish in Tampere and also actively advanced Finnish-speaking social life (she was one of the founders of the Finnish Ladies' Society). However, she was very strict about class distinctions and never participated herself in the meetings of the society (Rasila 1984, 41).

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the impulses for a national awakening grew stronger, the language situation in the Grand Duchy of Finland became more and more tense. Tampere was no exception. What is exceptional about the national revival in Finland is that many of the most avid proponents of Finnish were themselves Swedish-speakers. For example, F. E. Jalander, the first editor-in-chief of Aamulehti, a Tampere newspaper established in 1881 to support the cause of Finnish, was a fervent supporter of the Finnish language although he never mastered it himself. He wrote his editorials in Swedish, and before publication they were translated into Finnish by F. E. Jernberg, a skilled writer (Sinisalo 1970, 272).

At the same time, language debates became more heated in Tampere because of the discussions over how the two languages should be used in the new city council (1874) – that is, which language should have precedence and which should be limited to translation (Rasila 1984, 561; see also Voionmaa 1932, 286–288). The city administration was rapidly becoming more and more Finnish, and this created a degree of turmoil:

In 1875 it had been decided that the Council minutes would be kept in Swedish but the decisions would also be recorded in Finnish. In 1878 it had been decided that the minutes would be kept in Finnish and the decisions were also to be given in Swedish. In 1881 the Swedish decisions had been rather accidentally dropped, and in 1886 the Swedish-speaking council members demanded that the practice be reinstated. But the Council voted against their wishes, and it was officially decided that the minutes would from then on only be kept in Finnish. Swedish now had the same minority status in the city administration that it had always had among the population. (Rasila 1984, 571)

The battle for domination in official usage in the 1860s and 1870s was also reflected in the demands directed at lay people in their dealings with the city administration, as indicated in the following account:

Amongst the general public, official usage of languages was at this time highly confused. Finnish alone was used in application letters only by philistines – unable to use the language of civilisation themselves and too lazy to get their documents written in Swedish for them. These Finnish scribbles were assumedly only accepted by the magistrate out of pity or mercy. At that time, even true Fennophiles used Swedish in their documents, or occasionally they were written in two languages, but most wrote their messages in Swedish only, whether the result was in Tampere Swedish or some other form of gibberish. (Voionmaa 1932, 28–284)

In the Language Edict of 1863, mentioned above, Finnish was for the first time granted some official status, and Finns were accorded the right to request documents concerning them in Finnish translation. This decree can be seen to mark the beginning of institutional interpretation and translation practices as they exist in Finland today. Previously, some translators and interpreters for Finnish had been employed in Stockholm by the Crown, and the first legal translations into Finnish date from the fourteenth century, but translation had been sporadic (Koivusalo 2007). Earlier attempts at supporting the use of Finnish had been largely ineffective, but the edict led to action at local levels as well, although still with significant resistance and delays in implementation (McRae 1997, 36).

Tampere, too, was slow to comply with the decree. There were at first no translator posts, as the idea was to start hiring officials who would be able to provide these translations themselves (Voionmaa 1932, 284–285). The Finnish-speakers were not properly taken into account until after a new decree in 1883 stipulated that municipal administration was to operate in the language of the majority of the inhabitants (ibid., 288). Following the latter decree, the magistrate's office had to contract, for a period of 10 years, a translator to translate documents between Finnish and Swedish (ibid., 289). This state of affairs also highlights a more general aspect of institutional translation. Although we may tend to associate such translation with large multinational organizations, translating institutions, in fact, come in all shapes and sizes, from mega-organizations such as the United Nations or the European Union to small municipal translation bureaus manned by a single translator (Koskinen 2008, 26–32).

At the turn of the century, Russia tightened its hold on Finland, and the early years of the 1900s saw two subsequent Russification periods (1899–1905 and 1908–1917). Advancing the status of Finnish was seen as beneficial, as attempts to force the use of Russian by the administration proved futile, and the Language Decree of 1902 gave equal status to Finnish and Swedish (McRae 1997, 50). Although Swedish was gradually losing ground, the hierarchical class system guaranteed that its status remained untouched for quite some time. Tampere was an almost entirely Finnish-speaking city, but its administration had only recently shifted to Finnish, and its cultural elite was still mainly Swedish-speaking. One of the main newspapers was published in Swedish and, because of a complicated voting system, a small number of wealthy Swedish-speakers had more power than thousands of Finnish-speakers put together (Rasila 1984, 585).

As opposed to some other countries with a more complicated linguistic background, there were never violent language wars in Finland (and like the editor of Aamulehti, many fervent supporters of Finnish were themselves Swedish-speaking or had recently “translated” themselves into Finnish). The battle for domination was mainly fought in educational and cultural spheres that had been entirely Swedish-speaking. Finnish theatres and libraries were now established, and Finnish schools founded, and soon Finns outnumbered Swedish-speakers on both fronts. By the 1890s the pendulum had swung in the other direction (Engman 2009, 243; see also Voionmaa 1932, 283). Rasila (1984, 647) provides some telling figures. During the academic year 1899–1900, Tampere schools had 73 classes taught in Finnish and only 6 in Swedish. These classes comprised 2719 Finnish-speaking pupils and 122 Swedish-speaking ones. It was evident that cultural and social life would gradually become as Finnish as the church, education and the administration had already done.

Today, Tampere has a Swedish-speaking minority of some 1000 inhabitants – in other words, 0.5% of the population. It is a small community, and most of the hierarchy that once existed between the two languages has gone. In the everyday life of the Finnish-speakers, Swedish is barely noticeable. This invisibility or inaudibility is also explained by the fluent bilingualism of most contemporary Swedish-speakers. Although Swedish is still found in the landscape, English has usurped its role as the prestige language (Koskinen 2013b). Swedish is rarely heard in the streets, and it no longer dominates the upper echelons of social life. However, Tampere Swedish, and the community of its users, is still supported by the solid “linguistic infrastructure” it had acquired during its earlier period as a prestige language in the city (Lönnroth 2013). The Swedish school, Swedish parish, old people's home and Swedish club are Swedish “spaces”, making Tammerforssvenskan, now less a translated language and more a minority or heritage language, a “linguistic island” in its otherwise Finnish surroundings. The role of the school (established in 1895) is essential in providing continuity and socializing new generations into the community, but on an everyday basis the question of languages is pragmatic. Many pupils come from bilingual or monoglot Finnish families. Some of the employees in the school are Finnish-speakers, and in the daily life of the school there is constant movement between the two languages (Kingelin-Orrenmaa 2013). One significant aspect of the infrastructure is also legal protection. Swedish is an official language in Finland, and speakers of Swedish (together with Sami and sign language) have much more extensive language rights than do speakers of foreign languages.

Tampere was once a dual city, but, although these same two languages still coexist, today this duality is gone. Instead, the Swedish community is an established minority, protected by its history, its solid infrastructure and its legal rights, but threatened by the constant necessity for self-translation into Finnish in the city – and a commonly fluent ability to do so – as well as within the Swedish spaces such as the schools. In other words, the pressure for self-translation that was once imposed on the Finnish speaker, into Swedish, has now shifted direction. The old duality now lives on only in the two ice hockey teams, Ilves and Tappara, the latter originally a Swedish-speaking team. Ice hockey is extremely popular in Tampere, and those born in Tampere support either one or the other from birth, although for most supporters of either team the linguistic background now is unknown and irrelevant.

Russian: A curious lacuna

Throughout the nineteenth century, Swedish remained so dominant that it can be easily forgotten that during the period of the dual city Finland was no longer under Swedish rule but instead part of the Russian Empire. During that period (1809–1917) Russian never acquired a strong foothold. The new rulers initially had the aim of introducing Russian more widely, but never succeeded. There were not enough Russian-speakers in Finland, and attempts to train more teachers and to set language requirements for civil servants were never fully realized (Engman 2009, 232–235). In the data I have examined on Tampere, Russian is conspicuously absent although contacts with Russia are regularly discussed. Tampere merchants and industrialists had strong ties with St Petersburg, and knowledge of Russian was useful for business as Russia was the main export market (Rasila 1984, 113; see also Murros 1935). Lundahl had an apartment in St Petersburg, and is also known to have spoken Russian, but, as St Petersburg was a highly multilingual city at that time, German and French were equally relevant for business contacts; further, there were so many Finns there that St Petersburg was called the “second-biggest city in Finland” (Klinge 1997: 67, 114; on the migration of Finns into Russia see McRae [1997, 51–53]).

While the Russian Empire offered numerous new possibilities for Finns, Russians were not allowed to settle in Finland without permission, which offers at least a partial explanation for the small number of Russian-speakers there (McRae 1997, 30). The Russian minority in Tampere at the end of the nineteenth century consisted mainly of shopkeepers and entrepreneurs⁶ (Suodenjoki 2009, 149). The figures were small but rising: in 1881 there were 24 Russian-speakers (see Table 1); in 1890 the total figure was 60; and in 1900 it had reached 115. The Russians remained, therefore, a small minority in Tampere (as opposed to several thousand in Helsinki or Viipuri; ibid., 148). It is thus somewhat surprising that this group got its own grandiose Orthodox church (1898), shown in Figure 2. For a while there was also a Russian school next to the church, and seeing the rise of Russian in the grand duchy, some non-Russian families also saw it wise to enrol their children there. Towards the end of the period of Russian rule, as the rulers tried to promote Russian, political tensions arose, affecting the thus far amicable relations between the locals and the Russians living in Tampere (ibid.). In 1913, a Russian garrison was established in Tampere to strengthen their presence in the face of growing unrest, and with it, Russian became an omnipresent administrative and pragmatic language for the five years before independence⁷ (ibid., 173). I find this sudden rise and subsequent fall of a particular language intriguing. The upper elementary schools in Tampere offered Russian on their curriculum (Rasila 1984, 628, 633) but, all in all, Russian was not widely spoken in Tampere, which was located rather far from the Russian border and was not the capital city with higher education or state administration institutions where some Russian had been required before. A huge market for Russian interpreters and translators must have developed suddenly, and then five years later it was washed away by the tide of history. After Finnish independence, some of those Russians who decided to stay in Tampere translated their names into Finnish and started avoiding public use of Russian (ibid., 172; see also Latomaa 2009, 225).

Figure 2. The Orthodox Church in Tampere. (Photo: Lauri Hietala)

The contemporary linguistic scene as regards Russian is markedly different. The past two decades have seen a new wave of immigration, and Russian is now the biggest minority language in Tampere. In 2011 there were 11,919 non-Finnish-speaking inhabitants in Tampere (i.e. 5.7% of the population), and 2342 of them claimed Russian as their first language (see Table 3). That is more than twice the number of Swedish-speakers.⁸ Compared to Swedish, with its linguistic infrastructure, Russian has fewer supports. In the 1890s, when there were fewer than 100 Russians in Tampere, there were, in addition to the church that still stands in the city centre, a school and a nursery, and many Russian shops in the city. Today, the city of Tampere offers schooling in English, French and German, but not in Russian.

The suburb of Hervanta has the highest degree of multilingualism in Tampere. In its linguistic landscape, Russian is more visible here than elsewhere in the city. Russian can be heard on the streets and the only explicitly Russian shop presently in operation in Tampere (called Nash Magazin, “our shop”) is located in Hervanta. A local municipal school offers some basic information in Russian (and in English, Somali and Persian) for parents who have limited Finnish skills. Some of the Sunday services in the local parish are interpreted into Russian, and targeted activities for Russian-speakers are advertised in Russian and in Finnish (see Koskinen 2013b). Religion proves to be an interesting motivating factor behind translationality. Religious contexts stick out in the linguistic landscape data in Hervanta (ibid.) and appear repeatedly in the historical data, not only in the significant role that the church as an institution played in advancing Finnish, but also in more individual and personal religious motives for translating and interpreting in religious contexts (see e.g. Hirvonen 1957; Rasila 1984, 600, 616, 617; for a discussion on the motivation for interpreting in a religious context in contemporary Tampere, see Hokkanen 2012).

Parallel lives

When one peruses the historical data, one sees that the features that best describe the linguistic landscape in Tampere are parallelism and liberal bilingualism (see also Voionmaa 1932, 285). Nineteenth-century Finland is often portrayed through language debates and schisms (see e.g. McRae 1997, 37). The dominant perception of Tampere, however, is rather moderate. In spite of the dualistic character of the linguistic scene during the period 1809–1917 and the hierarchical structure that defined the languages, especially the two most dominant, into separate spheres of social and cultural life, core institutions were organized to allow for the parallel existence of both languages, and many individuals took an active role in safeguarding the existence of multiple languages. For example, at the time when there was only one church in Tampere, it was decided that services in Finnish and in Swedish were to be held on alternating Sundays, and one after the other at Christmas and Easter (Voionmaa 1929, 531–533). When possible, even more languages were taken into account, in a Lutheran aspiration to allow everyone the possibility of practising their religion in their own language (cf. the discussion of multilingual meetings at homes, above). Hirvonen (1957, 144–145) cites an anecdote about Mr Reginald Radcliffe, a preacher from Liverpool, who had travelled across Europe and came to Finland via Russia. He held religious meetings together with Edvard Björkenheim, one of the leaders of a Free Church revivalist movement who also acted as his interpreter (into Swedish). Hirvonen quotes the local newspaper Aamulehti from 15 May 1884:

Mr Radcliffe, who gives religious lectures in English, arrived here on Friday and has since delivered six sermons, of which three have been interpreted into Swedish, one was actually in English to serve speakers of English living here, and two were translated into Finnish. On each occasion the factory church was full. (Ibid., 145)

It is also known who interpreted the sermons into Finnish. A Finnish student, Antti Mäkinen, who was studying at the Dr Grattan Guinness Missionary School,⁹ had been sent all the way from London (ibid.). In other words, considerable resources were dedicated to finding a qualified interpreter (with linguistic skills and subject knowledge) for both Swedish and Finnish.

Education was first available in Swedish only, but during the second half of the nineteenth century the pressure grew to offer schooling in Finnish. In schools as well as elsewhere, the parallel existence of the languages was tolerated. In Tampere the lower elementary schools were organized so that each pupil was allowed to read and speak in either Swedish or Finnish. In Tampere, this practice made the schools almost entirely Finnish. In upper elementary school, instruction was offered in both languages according to need, and after that only in Finnish, which all pupils were expected to have mastered by that point (this was probably one reason for founding the separate Swedish school in 1895). It has been argued that if schooling across Finland had been organized in the manner adopted in Tampere, major language schisms would have been avoided (Rasila 1984, 634). This bilingual practice also illustrates the benefits of language learning as opposed to translation as a long-term strategy in situations such as the one in Tampere where the linguistic contact is permanent. In particular, since few professional translators and interpreters were available, and self-translation and translation by volunteers abounded, having the two language groups learn the other's language from an early age made perfect sense (Pym 2012, 153–156).

The confusion of languages in the city council has already been discussed above. What is remarkable about the first debates is that neither side demanded that the other language be absent. It was more a question of which was to be dominant, but it seems to have been clear to all that both needed a role. According to the minutes from January 1875, it was decided that everyone would be able to speak freely in either of the two languages, with the condition that when the speakers themselves were not providing their message in both languages (i.e. self-translation), an interpretation into the other language must be provided. The minutes further report that one of the council members, Reverend Törnudd, volunteered to act as an interpreter (cited in Voionmaa 1932, 286). Ten years later this parallel compromise was dropped in favour of Finnish. During the 1870s the atmosphere was still peaceful, but tensions became more tangible and positions more sharply held in the next decade (ibid., 351), as Finnish was pushed forward even though many officials, in practice, were still unable to express themselves properly in that language (Klinge 1997, 297).

The extent of the system of parallel existence of Swedish and Finnish may best be seen in the workers' movement. Tampere was an industrial city and one of the strongholds of this new international movement in Finland. Workers were predominantly if not exclusively Finnish-speakers, but when the Tampere Workers' Society was founded in 1886, its regulations were printed bilingually (Rasila 1984, 294). In other words, the language issue was not considered a political one, and the workers' identity was not constructed around language issues (also, it must be added, many of the first activists in the workers' movement did not come from a working-class background). Parallelism and the avoidance of extremism is also clearly visible in the linguistic landscape of the time as evidenced in the local newspapers and the commercial advertisements seen in old photographs that are used as illustrations in history books. Often they follow a strictly duplicating strategy, offering the exact same information in an identical visual form in both Finnish and in Swedish (see e.g. ibid., 315, 324, 383).

Street signs are one defining feature of the linguistic landscape. In Tampere, one can interpret the changing historical status of various languages by looking at what happens on the street corners. As the city grew and new streets were built in the nineteenth century, signs were erected in two languages, Swedish and Finnish. In 1903, in a demonstration of power, the government not only ordered the inclusion of Russian, it demanded that the Russian sign be placed highest (Voionmaa 1932, 396). During the short Russification period (1903–1917), there were thus three signs on each corner: Russian on top, Finnish in the middle and Swedish at the bottom. After Finnish independence, the Russian street signs were quickly taken down, and a few years later (in 1920) the Swedish ones were also removed (Lönnroth 2009, 129). According to the present Language Act (2003; §5 and §33), a municipality must have signs in both languages if the minority is 8% or more of the population, and the majority language is to be placed on top. The 0.5% Swedish minority in Tampere is clearly below that threshold. As a historical document, the Swedish school located in the corner of Koulukatu [School Street] and Satamakatu [Harbour Street] still has bilingual street signs on its walls (Kingelin-Orrenmaa 2013).

The newly born nation was and is officially bilingual, but it promoted the use of Finnish, and new generations of more educated Finnish-speakers were entering the social and cultural scenes. With Swedish losing its prioritized position, Tampere became a predominantly Finnish-speaking city (Latomaa 2009, 236), and this linguistic set-up remained fairly stable until the 1990s, when successive waves of migration led to a tripling of the number of foreign-born inhabitants in Finland (ibid., 229). It is interesting to see whether there are similar systems of parallel linguistic accommodation now in place for the new minority languages. In religious settings, the basic principles of access to religion seem very similar (Hokkanen 2013), but in many other fields of life, translationality is clearly managed differently now. On the present city council (2008–2012), there is one representative of the Swedish Party and one with an immigrant background, but these two members do not need interpretation (which implies that without proper knowledge of Finnish, one's path may be blocked). Schools are another area where a parallel right to read and write one's own language simply is not possible because the number of languages is so huge (more than 100 as opposed to the bilingual school of the nineteenth century). Instead, in a complex system of professional scaffolding and ad hoc solutions, city-hired community interpreters are used to fill in communicative gaps between parents and teachers, and children are expected to learn to survive in Finnish-speaking classes while their native language is also supported at school (see Latomaa 2013). The Swedish school operates closest to the earlier bilingual model, but since its task is to support the minority language in the new linguistic landscape where it is constantly being threatened by the majority language, there is a limit to the parallel usage it can tolerate (Kingelin-Orrenmaa 2013).

Conclusions: The changing face of multilingualism

Multi-ethnicity and multilingualism are not only contemporary phenomena, but each time and place gives them a different flavour. Changing times lead to changes in the linguistic landscape, and the extent of translationality, the systems of managing and organizing translational practices, as well as the concrete manifestations of translational action, are continuously being moulded on the local level. In the nineteenth-century social life of Tampere, being an interpreter was not a profession in itself but a contingent activity undertaken by some who had the willingness and the linguistic resources to function as intermediaries. There seem to have been at least three kinds of these intermediaries. First, there were highly prominent (male) interpreters (of prominent male figures) such as Gustav Lundahl, Edvard Björkenheim, Reverend Törnudd, or the public prosecutor who is mentioned as having been a court interpreter to a Swedish industrialist around 1810¹⁰ (Murros 1935, 90). Second, there were invisible translators similar to the anonymous nursemaids of the Finlayson orphanage or Katarina Ekblom who were quick to pick up the languages around them, and were then asked to function as mediators. Third, instances of self-translation were frequent, and they were used both for pragmatic reasons and to improve one's social status as well as to promote cultural ideologies. If one compares this to the situation today, the highest profile interpreters are no longer visible, but instead there now exists a professional group that serves communication needs in multilingual administrative and business contexts. As before, there are still numerous less official occasions where communication is problematic, and, as before, there are individuals who step in and act as intermediaries in the workplaces, in schools and families, and in everyday contacts in and around the city of Tampere. And, as before, self-translation is still a means of surviving, of improving one's social status or for promoting cultural ideologies.

The linguistic and translational set-up is completely different from what it was in the nineteenth century. Finnish-speakers, the underdogs of the language disputes of the nineteenth century, are now the dominant group, whereas the minority has expanded from a few languages into more than 100 different languages, most of them spoken by a handful of people. The nineteenth-century history of Tampere can be seen as an example of a mutually respectful parallel existence. Similar parallelism is not possible with dozens of languages, but the heritage of mutual acceptance can still guide the decisions now that the Finnish-speakers in Tampere need to return the same tolerance and support that they were shown a century ago.

Languages, practices and power relations may shift and change, but what remains constant is the fact that the city is and remains a place for language contacts. The seams and sutures of history have drawn and will continue to draw the linguistic map of Tampere in particular ways.

Note on contributor

Kaisa Koskinen is professor of translation studies at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. She is the author of Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation (2000) and Translating Institutions: An Ethnographic Study of EU Translation (2008) and the co-editor (with Tuija Kinnunen) of Translators' Agency (2010). Her current research interests include usability and translation, translation and affect, literary retranslations in Finland, and the city of Tampere as a translational space.

Notes

1. Even within the local Finnish context, coastal towns such as Viipuri (Vyborg), now on the Russian side of the border, or the capital city of Helsinki (Helsingfors), would come to mind more easily if one were looking for a predominantly multilingual city. The appeal of Tampere as an object of study within the framework of multilingualism is precisely in it not being or having been exceptionally multilingual.

2. Notably, translational action also includes activities other than translation – for example, consultations.

3. This data is in Finnish (and to some extent in Swedish). All quotations from these references have been translated by the author.

4. Finlayson is a quasi-mythical figure in the history of Tampere, but was not himself a successful factory-owner; it was those who came after who made the Finlayson factory a success (see Voionmaa 1929, 136–208).

5. It would be a simplification to argue that Swedish was spoken only by the upper class in Finland because in many bilingual areas Swedish is spoken at all levels of society. However, since Tampere was predominantly a Finnish-speaking region, the nineteenth-century class distinctions were rather sharp.

6. Some of the merchants arriving from Russia were Tatars and Jews. The Tatar language has survived in Tampere until the present, but Yiddish always had a more precarious existence, and does not figure in the present linguistic scene at all (see Latomaa 2009).

7. Finnish independence in 1917 was followed by a traumatic and bloody civil war between the Reds (the socialists) and the Whites (the conservatives) in which Russian soldiers were also involved, and during which also many Russian civilians were killed. Tampere was one of the central battlefronts. There is as yet no research on the languages and translation cultures on either side of this conflict, and the events were too complicated to be accounted for in this article (for an overview of the conflict, see McRae 1997, 55–58).

8. Swedish is the second-largest minority language (1083), followed by Arabic, Estonian, English, Chinese, Kurdish, Somali and Dari (City of Tampere 2011).

9. East London Missionary Training School.

10. This is interesting because it indicates that the court was functioning in Finnish rather than in Swedish, which is given as the language of administration prior to 1875 in many other sources (e.g. Voionmaa 1932, 283–284; see also Lönnroth 2009, 124).