You'll never know unless you try. - English example sentence

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{{vm.sentence.expandLabel}} Fewer translations

deniko September 25, 2018 September 25, 2018 at 3:25:43 PM UTC

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211 Finnish translations? Truly amazing. I wonder whether those are legit translations or some kind of a joke.

alexmarcelo September 25, 2018 September 25, 2018 at 3:28:39 PM UTC

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They might be legit, but I wonder how useful they are.

Thanuir September 25, 2018 September 25, 2018 at 5:46:00 PM UTC

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I stand behind all of the Finnish sentences. There is a combinatorial explosion going on with them; there are several patterns and combining them leads to a large number of variations.

They are kirjakieli, not puhekieli. Maybe I should also add some puhekieli variations, but I was kind of exhausted by all of the present ones.

deniko September 26, 2018, edited November 29, 2018 September 26, 2018 at 8:11:18 AM UTC, edited November 29, 2018 at 9:28:10 AM UTC

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Edit: This is a reply on a deleted comment that asked a few questions:

> Which ones would you recommend to be learned first?
> Which ones are the most naturally sounding sentences?

Or something like this, obviously, I don't remember the exact wording, it was 2 months ago.
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I don't know Finnish :) But since I often do multiple translations of one English sentence into Ukrainian, these questions often don't really make much sense.

Let's take a simple example:

You were there.

"You" can be a girl, a boy, a group of people. If we are addressing a single person, are we doing it formally or informally? Depending on the answer, you use different "you"s and different "were"s. This results in 5 different translation variants. None of them can be recommended to be learnt first, they're just used in different contexts.

Also, in English the word order is rather inflexible, in Ukrainian you can say something like "You there were" and "You were there", and it means the same. This results in 10 different translation variants.

I can assume that might be similar in Finnish. Although I'm still amazed with how you can come up with 200+ translations. My personal best is probably no more than 15.

Thanuir September 28, 2018 September 28, 2018 at 6:21:50 AM UTC

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The situation is similar to what Denico described.

Denico, if you combine the five different translations and the ten different word orders, that creates 50 combinations, if all of them are possible and sensible. If one of the words has a couple of synonyms, you are at around 150 combinations. Just be systematic about going through all of them, if you want to.