this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Juu sammoo miäkkii uonny uatelna. Kaekkee hienoenta tämmöttiissä uonku eip nuo alakoritmit ja semmottet oekkeest uo mittee ees ratkassukkaa. Miä eilispäevänä justiinsa opinni etteep tekoviksut ossoo ees kunnolla murutehia kientöö, vaek kyl miä nii luulinni juu. Tämmöttii kup vähäsennii huastelloopi ni eip hyö siihe oekkee mittee osannukkaa virikata! Kuukkels tuo etteenki se suols aenaki iha pelekköö paskoo, ol ihap hauskoo kyl lukkoo ja naaraa.
Is this supposed to be a meta comment to show that machine translation can't help us read it?
Edit: If it is, well DeepL manages a pretty coherent translation:
I'm guessing "sub-rhythm" should be "algorithm" and "pros" probably means software and not people. The last sentences could use some more context. But otherwise this sounds kinda logical.
Now Google Translate…
…yeah.
Yes.
If it was unclear, the point is: pick a random finn from the street and they can translate that pretty much from word to word, even if they are from a complete different dialect speaking area, whereas even at best AI could give you only something towards it. I can only use obscure things, like this as an example, as I do not speak that many other languages, but if the languages do not have much written record online, they are not going to be properly translatable. We are still surprisingly far from not needing human translators.
//And yes, Google was hilariously shit. I managed to make couple normal sentences, without even trying, that it just gave up completely and did not translate at all, only removed some random letters.
I was just at a networking/research technology conference in Helsinki (TNC26) where the topic of nordic languages— especially minority ones—being under-represented by current automated transcription/translation tools came up in one of the side talks I attended. There's some effort by various European NRENs and universities to train models on these languages so those tools can be more widely available to students, academics, and the public. The talk was about "Scribe" by SUNET (Swedish Research Network) hosting whisper models for this purpose.
That said, I do believe that learning a language by studying, immersion in the culture, and actually having conversations with people who speak it natively is the only way to really experience another language. There's always something lost in translation if you can't internalize a language by living it. In some ways language is one of the parts of the human experience that's unique and irreproducible by LLMs (despite the name). Language is more than rote communication of information; it conveys ideas, emotions, the weight of memory and history.
Also, Finnish is fucking hard lol. I can usually pick up a bit of language wherever I travel, basic phrases usually. But DAMN trying to nail the epiglottal sounds of even "Hyvää yötä" threw me!
I only got to see Helsinki, but it was a beautiful city. The Finnish people I met were lovely with a great dry sense of humor, and I would love to visit again someday.
Kippis
That should be especially good for things like the multiple sapmi languages! At least in finnish you can already write in the proper "book language" and get pretty accurate translations, even though the dialects still escape that.
It is usually especially hard to learn for indo-european speakers, so it is not just you struggling! Haha :)