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 programmes 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 2017 Language Services had a full- or part-time staff of 32 teachers, 27 translators, 52 language revisors and four members of administrative staff.
TRAINING SERVICES
In 2017 Language Services organised 118 courses for a total of 2,191 participants.
| LANGUAGE TRAINING |
Number of courses Number of participants |
| TRAINING COMMISSIONED BY THE UNIVERSITY | 82 |
| Participants in training commissioned by the University | 1141 |
| OPEN FINNISH COURSES | 36 |
| Participants in open Finnish courses | 1050 |
| UH participants in open Finnish courses | 250 |
| TOTAL NUMBER OF TEACHING HOURS | 3345 |
| TOTAL NUMBER OF CREDITS | 3639 |
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 used in other studies. The Finnish courses open to all will continue to be offered free of charge to the University’s international staff and postgraduate students: in 2017 members of the University community accounted for almost a quarter of the participants in such courses.
TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE REVISION SERVICES
A total of 7,804 pages of translations requested by University units were produced in 2017, an increase of 36% from the previous year. Most of the translations were from Finnish into English or Swedish.
A total of 62,561 pages of texts by members of the University community underwent a language revision, up 60% from the previous year, mainly due to an experiment involving the abolishment of revision fees for all texts in the spring term. Most of the revised texts were academic and scholarly documents written in English.
| TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE REVISION | NUMBER OF PAGES |
| TRANSLATIONS FOR UNIVERSITY UNITS | 7804 |
| English translations | 4365 |
| Swedish translations | 3378 |
| Translations involving other languages | 61 |
| LANGUAGE REVISIONS FOR MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY | 62561 |
Language Services collects customer feedback on all its services: customers have continued to praise the professional skills of its staff and the friendly service provided by Language Services!