Browsing by Author "Torvikoski, Maiju"

My Pro Gradu thesis concentrates on how to translate the English word please into Finnish. As in the Finnish language there is no unambiguous translation for please, the results are diverse. This thesis is based on a Bachelor’s thesis I made in 2012, but this time the scope is wider; whereas my Bachelor’s was about how to translate please in television subtitles, this study compares subtitles to literature translations. In other words, the basis for this study is to a) find as many Finnish translations for please as possible, b) categorize the findings based on their core meaning, and c) explore whether or not there are differences between television subtitles and literature translations. The material was collected in summer 2015 using the first five seasons of Sex and the City the television series and three books by Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell. One of the books is the basis for the television series. The material, i.e. the please-words, were collected by using information technology as help. The collection of the data started from the literature. I used three books by Bushnell: Sex and the City, 2000, Lipstick Jungle, 2005, and One Fifth Avenue, 2008. I downloaded all the three books on an electronic reading device and used its search activity to locate each please-word with their contexts. I typed those findings in a word document, after which I looked for their Finnish equivalents manually from the Finnish translations of the books. Once that was done, I moved onto the television series. As the five seasons of Sex and the City included more than 33 hours of audiovisual material, I used Sex and the City -internet page, onto which all the lines from each episode were collected. By using the search activity, I was able to locate all the please-words and their contexts from all the five seasons. I wrote down the time stamps of each please-word and then looked for how each please was translated into Finnish on the DVDs. As the result of my analysis, 39 different translations for please were found. I categorized those findings in 14 different groups, the representatives of which share the same core meaning. The categories were the following, starting from most common one: 1. Omission of the translation; 2. Conditional; 3. Interrogative; 4. Disbelief and irritation; 5. Ole kiltti; 6. Kiitos; 7. the morpheme -han/hän 8. Ole hyvä; 9. Teitittely; 10. Nyt; 11. Pyytää; 12. Vain; 13. Please; 14. Miscellaneous. There were remarkable differences between the literature translations and the subtitles. The most significant difference was the omission of the translation: in the literature the translation for please was left out much more rarely than in the subtitles. The most likely reason for such a phenomenon was the time and space limits that come with subtitles. In the literature translations there was also a lot more variation (even) within one category: for example, there were remarkably more ways (6) of expressing disbelief and irritation in the literature than in the subtitles. It is obvious that more limited variation in the subtitles is due to the limits of time and the number of characters that can be fitted to the screen at once. The goal of this study was to find out in how many different ways please translates into Finnish in both television series and in literature. The study gives out a preliminary idea of the versatility of the Finnish translations of please. Further studies could examine for example children’s literature, as for kids of the 2000s the word please is a lot more familiar than it was for those born in the previous century.