One of the perqs of being a foreigner at church is that they hardly ever ask you to speak in Sacrament Meeting. It’s great. But my annual turn came up today and I had to give a talk in Finnish. My system is that I write the talk first in English but try not to put in anything too complex. Then I copy that English text and paste it into a fresh document and put it into Finnish. I say ‘put’ rather than ‘translate’ because I often have to remove stuff I can’t figure out how to say, and simplify things so that it makes some semblence of sense. I have access to the MOT dictionaries through my work and they are the BEST. If there’s anything I can’t figure out from my own brain or from the MOT dictionaries, I ask Magdalena for help. This is my system. It works ok.
As I prepared this talk, the following Venn Diagram took shape in my mind:
Finding overlap between any two of these circles isn’t impossible. All three is challenging.
Oh well, it’s over for now and Magdalena said I only made “a few” mistakes! High praise indeed from the family Finnish expert.
