THANK YOU

Thank you very kindly for the generous amounts of feedback we received last week, in response to that disgracefully self-indulgent piece about our being five years old. I mean, what’s five years on the universe scale of things?
      We were initially tickled pink at the hugely positive response we got.
      However, in the infrequent moments of clarity between punching the air and saying "Yeesss!", we eventually reflected that if someone had a 50th birthday party, it is highly unlikely any of the guests would stand up, champagne glass in hand, and say: "Well, you’ve reached 50, but your life has been a complete waste of time and space - why were you born anyway?". It simply is not the done thing in polite Western society, or anywhere else for that matter.
      Consequently, we recognise that the picture we got may be a little one-sided. Complaints do not - and should not - require a specific request.
      In any event, the exercise was still well worth while, as we got stacks of nice mail, which we naturally passed up the chain of command. We aren’t completely stupid.
     
We have also learned a great deal. We discovered for instance that a Finnish ambassador spends our tax euros on wining and dining long-haired deadbeat students (doubtless it’s foxily listed as "attracting dynamic young talent to Finland").
      Then we learned that there’s a Helsingin Sanomat subscriber out there who gets the print paper but doesn’t speak or read Finnish. We dread to think what he does with it, but must assume that cat litter is seriously overpriced in this country.
      A big Thank You to the Finnish hockey team for losing with grace last Tuesday night: it seems all the Canadian correspondents absolutely love us. But wasn’t Tuomo Ruutu’s  goal a beauty? Jaw-dropping, indeed, as one person wrote.
     
We received a salutary lesson in the power and patriotic fervour of our Nigerian readers, who demanded (and will get) an apology for the reference to get-rich-quick scams emanating from their part of the world.
      In fairness to them, it is by no means only a Nigerian problem these days, and has spread to countless countries. We have even received mail purporting to be from a “Laura Bush”, who claims to be the widow of the former President of the United States and would like us to deposit a really terrifyingly large sum of money on her behalf (we’re thinking about it).
      Hence we unreservedly apologise for and withdraw the Nigerian reference and replace it with the following: "That way we can separate it from all the exciting offers to get rich, inspired by the 419 scam." We suggest readers check the link below for details on this.
     

Finally, we learned that one man’s prose is another’s con. A majority of respondents were pleasantly complimentary about the linguistic merits of our texts, but a couple suggested they were inadvertently "hilarious" because of translation slip-ups.
      Firstly, we don’t do "inadvertently hilarious" - if it’s funny, it’s deliberate - and secondly, the cardinal rule with ANY comments like this is to give us something to work with. It’s not likely to help us find out and correct what is wrong if we are simply told "it’s wrong". If there is something you don’t like, or you think is clunky, then let us know the details.
      We do actually take pains to weed out annoying typos (sometimes after they have slipped into print) and to maintain a reasonable standard of English, though we realise we are hopelessly out of date. The correct received form of the genitive of the personal pronoun "it" is these days supposed to be "it’s", the plural of "county" is "county’s", "you're" has been modified to "your", and "definitely" is deffanately speeled "definately" on most websites from the BBC on downwards. We’ve been out of the country a long time and we’re out of practice - that’s the whole trouble.
     
A more serious point, and one that may bother some people, is that a long time ago we made a conscious decision that we would adopt British English spelling, if for no other reason than that we are in Europe, and because we need to preserve a semblance of stylistic uniformity.
      There is a Finnish expression that roughly translates as: "When you bow to one person, you moon another", but our American readers should NOT take the presence of a U in "colour" or an S in "realise" as a declaration of language war. At least two of the people on staff have an American background.
      The business of translation is often about compromise, particularly when rendering culturally-bound concepts. We sincerely hope that the writing does not reflect anything more than a sort of "neutral" English, without too many obviously "British" concepts - or "American" ones for that matter - getting in the way.
     
Your letters painted in our minds a lovely image of people all over the world eagerly hitting the "refresh" button at around 13.00 Finnish time, greedily searching for new snippets of news about air guitar competitions or the annual collective bargaining agreements circus.
      Probably the most heart-warming thing was to see how many of the respondents did not "need" our articles in any shape or form, but they read about Finland simply because they have a soft spot for the place. There was one delicious line: "We are the kind of people who are not at all bored to read stories about a cabinet re-shuffle in a country of limited geo-political importance".
      Yes. It has a nice ring to it.
      It is easy to sit here and moan about the high rate of personal taxation, the expensive booze, the November slush, and the lack of decent Wensleydale and Red Leicester cheese in the shops, but there are obviously a mass of people out there who LIKE Finland a lot, warts and all. Some of them even live here, too.
     
     
COMPLAINTS AND REQUESTS
     
     
Yes, we got some. The yellow background received some anticipated flak. It is of course a matter of taste, and to be honest, rather like the noise of planes if one lives on an airport approach path, I find I stop noticing it after a while. The narrowness of the columns on the screen also came in for some stick. An upstanding son of Erin writing from Dublin suggested that perhaps the British flag was unnecessary and we should just have "In English" up there at the top of the Finnish site. Fair point.
      A couple of people requested more in the way of gossipy items to allow foreigners to interact with Finns over the coffee-table. It’s not a bad thought. I mean, who really wants to discuss the budget or TUPO negotiations with a mouth full of sticky bun? Divorce and drunk-driving is much easier.
      There is nevertheless a tabloid slippery slope here, I’m sure. Still, in all fairness, we HAVE covered most of the usual suspects (Matti N., Andy M., wife-carrying contests, sauna endurance competitions, the air guitarist votes scandal, condom taxis, etc, etc.) that shove Finland reluctantly across the international news threshold. We just don’t go on and on about them seven days a week.
      The tabloid flyers are, by the way, THE way of telling you that you have been away from a country too long. When you cease to recognise the first-names on the cover who are experiencing secret trysts, divorce, silicone implants, or rehab, it’s a sure sign you’ve lost touch.
     
One person at least complained a bit about the (small) font-size.
      I’ll stick my neck out on this one and suggest it can be resolved if you change your browser settings. If you are using Internet Explorer, click on "View" and on "Text Size" in the drop-down menu. If it says "Smaller", then change it to "Medium", and if it says "Medium", change it to "Larger". If it already says "Largest", then please consult your nearest ophthalmic surgeon.
      One caveat about font-size changes, however: they can sometimes lead to small glitches in the line spacing and layout. Pages may look funny.
     
While we are being a bit geeky here, those of you who do not use IE (and I’m sure there are many), it would be nice to hear of any strange phenomena that you may get onscreen with Netscape, Firefox, Opera, or whatever you do use.
      The little squares you can occasionally see where there should be quotation-marks (though we try to remove them as quickly as possible) are a typical Net problem, found on many news-sites. Blame Microsoft - everybody else does.
     
There was a plea for Branston Pickle and Wensleydale cheese in Helsinki. It was probably tongue-in-cheek, but  apparently there are a few ethnic stores off the Hakaniemi Square that some ex-pats say throw up the oddest items.
      You might also find these goodies (at a price) in Stockmann’s delicatessen downtown, and it never hurts to ask them to stock something. They’ll probably only say "But there’s no call for it", but if enough people bombard them with requests for funky items, they’ll start feeling a bit silly about that. But piimä in London, hmmm... isn’t it buttermilk?
     
Some people wished we would publish earlier. The "I want to read it in my lunchbreak" issue is a bit of a thorny problem. I’d like to say we are so international that it’s hard to tell if readers are getting us with their lunch, their breakfast muesli, or last thing at night, but ultimately it comes down to our own willingness to get up at the crack of dawn and blast away on translating/editing these things.
      In all honesty, we WERE a bit sloppy for a while, but I think we’ve stuck to the 13.00 deadline moderately well after we moved over to the spiffy new editorial system in April. The odd thing is that when we started in 1999 (as more or less a one-man operation), we had a 12.00 publishing time, and we even kept to it for a few months, before the human interface threw up his hands and cried "enough already".
      Without going into too many details, it should be made clear that the International Edition does not employ an army of translators, nor does it operate on a multi-million dollar budget. If it did, then it might be possible to turn out copy a bit earlier, and even create the full-service portal some were hoping for. Another thought is that stories could possibly be posted up as and when they are completed, but we have thus far preferred to publish the package when it is all done. Occasionally we add late-breaking stuff later.
     
There were a few suggestions that we get advertisements. Yes. We concur. We’ve been down this road before.
      Pop-ups would annoy people, I’m sure, but I quite agree that there’s plenty of room in the margins (whether you like that yellow colour or not) to put a few ads in. It might quieten down the "too narrow columns" critics, too. We’ll ask again.
     
On the balance between "national" material and Helsinki-based pieces, a subject brought up by quite a few respondents, we do have to be careful not to turn this into a local paper. As the letters indicated, by no means everyone who reads our pages has nokia.com as an e-mail address, and a listing of the candidates for the municipal elections would hardly serve someone logging in from Japan. Hello, Tokyo, by the way. 
      On the other hand, I was told by a senior editor from the newspaper that during the recent 24-hour strike by bus drivers, the only people spotted at bus-stops on Monday morning were foreigners. Perhaps they were not English speakers? We certainly gave fair warning of what was coming down.
     
Editorials and columns are an important part of the weeklies input, even if they relate to subjects outside of our direct ambit.
      It is important that the paper’s "voice" gets out. Several people in the U.S. for example, commented favourably on the ability to read "how the other half sees it". But it is also important not to confuse what an independent newspaper writes in op-ed pieces with "what Finland thinks", whether this is referring to the official line or to the groundswell of public opinion. Both can be equally blinkered. Mixing editorial comment and straight facts articles is of course very, very naughty indeed.
     
Full marks to all those who took the hint and voted for a searchable archive. Your cheques and beers are in the mail.
     
The Webortages are starting to smell, yes. They really ought to go, even if one reader uses them in class. What should we put in their place? In fact that whole section at the bottom of the page needs input. Suggestions welcomed.
     
More photos? Yes. We’ll try, but we are restricted to what is in the online archives.
     
A printed edition once a week, please. Hmm. In theory, very nice. You can read it in bed with coffee. Of course you COULD print out the online pages, too. But printing a real paper edition gets us into a whole different ball-game, and really would only serve - at best - the Helsinki readers. I do not think it is very likely to happen, but who knows?.
     
More details on what’s on in Helsinki? Again, great in principle, but rather laborious and geared to the local audience.
      We have updated the Links page (see below) to add some sites that may help, though inevitably there is often a Finnish-language barrier to be overcome. The same goes for culture stories - music travels well enough, but fiction, theatre, and Finnish cinema (with the possible exception of Aki Kaurismäki) present some problems. There is now a link in there to movie listings, by the way.
     
     
Once again, many many thanks to those who took the trouble, and we hope that the service remains useful to you.
      Don’t feel that you need an invitation to write next time.
     
     
WLM for IntEd


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Five Years On

See also:
  A list of possibly useful links for readers (Updated September 2004)

Links:
  Who is sending you all those scam e-mails?