Language Services 2018

The core mission of the Language Centre’s Language Services unit is to provide services that support the University in its role as a bilingual, international and multicultural institution. We provide language training to University staff and doctoral schools as well as language revision and translation services for members of the University community. In addition, we offer fee-based open Finnish courses to clients from outside the University, which are also available to the University’s international staff and postgraduate students for no fee.

The duties of Language Services also include, where necessary, responsibility for the communication and language training of the University community as well as projects and development related to the implementation of the University’s language policy or other activities that require language services.

In 2018 Language Services had a full- or part-time staff of approximately 30 teachers, 30 translators and 60 language revisors as well as five members of administrative staff: the unit director, the heads of the language training, translation services and language revision teams as well as a language training coordinator.

Training services    

In 2018 Language Services organised approximately 130 courses for a total of more than 2,300 participants.

Open Finnish courses have remained free of charge for the University’s international staff and postgraduate students. In 2018 a third of the course participants were members of the University community.

All training provided by Language Services is based on the requirements of the academic credit system (=workload) and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (=skill level) and can thus be included in other studies.

Translation and language revision services

A total of some 8,700 pages of translations ordered by University units (approx. 2,200 orders) were produced in 2018. Most of the translations were from Finnish into English or Swedish.

More than 53,000 pages of texts by members of the University community (approx. 1,800 orders) underwent a language revision.

Most of the revised texts were academic and scholarly documents written in English.

Language Services collects customer feedback on all its services: customers have continued to praise the professional skills and friendly service provided by the Language Services staff!