“Does anybody here speak Finnish?” Linguistic first aid and emerging translational spaces on the Finnish-Russian Allegro train

ABSRACT

The object of this study is the Allegro train that shuttles between St Petersburg, Russia and Helsinki, Finland. It is an international, cross-border train on which the passengers, personnel and border officials coming from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds interact in a multilingual, mobile environment. I study the translational spaces of the Allegro in a top-down direction (the officially established multilingual policy as it appears in the organizational documentation and in the train’s spatial repertoire) and in a bottom-up direction (the real, on-the-ground translational practices as they appear through observation and interviews with passengers, train personnel and officials). Translational spaces of the Allegro emerge, on the one hand, from the multilingual spatial repertoire of the train, and, on the other hand, from the spontaneous ad hoc interpreting self-administered by participants.

KEYWORDS:

• Translational spaces
• multilingualism
• train
• ad hoc interpreting
• translation from below
• metrolingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Svetlana Probirskaja is a lecturer in Finnish–Russian translation at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her PhD thesis focused on bilateral agreements between Russia and Finland in the light of translational keyword analysis. Recently, her research interests have included wartime and military interpreting and translation, and everyday interpreting and translation practices. She combines these two topics in research of encounters between Finns and Russians during the war and peacetime. Her research project “Everyday Encounters between Russians and Finns in Translational Spaces of the War and the Train” is financed by the Kone Foundation.

Notes

1 See the project website https://translationinww2infin.wordpress.com/.

2 Koskinen (2012) first applied Reh’s typology in her study of translational spaces of the suburb of Hervanta in Tampere, Finland.

3 All translations from Russian and Finnish are the author’s unless otherwise specified.

4 “Combination of languages” refers to relay-interpreting in professional terminology.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Koneen Säätiö [grant number 26596-18].