Punctuation in Finnish and German: a contrastive analysis of the use of the colon and its application to translation studies

This presentation addresses the functions and interpretations of the colon in Finnish and German, such as in the sentences containing lists Niin trollit verkossa tekevät: ärsyttävät, provosoivat, hämmentävät ja toistavat jotakin hokemaa niin kauan, että muutkin tarttuvat siihen (‘That's how trolls behave online: they annoy, provoke, confuse, and repeat some catchphrase until others pick it up as well’) or, in German, Denn: Wer zahlt, dem ist Bildung etwas wert (‘Because: Whoever pays values education’), where the colon is used as a pragmatic device. While Finnish and German grammars share similarities in their use of the colon—such as introducing lists and direct speech—they also exhibit notable differences; to this end, this corpus-based analysis seeks to examine these differences by determining the extent of these variations and exploring their underlying causes. 4000 examples were extracted from two national newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Helsingin Sanomat, and manually sorted: captions and other non-text elements such as bibliographical references, dates, sport results as well as TV guides were excluded. The continuous texts were then searched for statement 1: statement 2 and defined regarding their syntactic, structural, and semantic variation between Finnish and German. In this talk, we particularly focus on the semantic analysis that investigates how the statements before and after the colon are thematically connected, and how the topical progression may differ between the two languages. For instance, our analysis shows that German often uses the colon for summarizing or rephrasing preceding content, while Finnish primarily uses it for lists. In both languages, however, the colon serves to specify expressions, but it also has a pragmatic role by marking a pause for thought or speech. Lastly, since punctuation marks have largely been neglected in the field of translation studies, we aim to discuss how Finnish – German – Finnish translations preserve the intended meaning and communicative nuances of the original text. The results of the study are particularly important for translators who have to recognize and interpret sentence and text topological differences in translated texts as well as for language German learners of Finnish or Finnish learners of German who face linguistic difficulties in acquiring the subtle nuances associated with punctuation.