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. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.