Tammivaara Digital Marketing

Finnish is a unique language with complex grammar, sometimes ridiculously long compound words, and specific cultural tone. That’s why choosing the right translation tool is very important.

Here’s a breakdown of the best and most popular tools for translating into Finnish — including what they’re good at, what doesn’t really work, and how to get the best results.

1. Google Translate

Pros:

• Free, fast, and easy to use
• Good for getting the general meaning
• Easy to access anywhere

Cons:

• Struggles with grammar and tone
• The translations are very literal, so it often creates unnatural sentence structures in Finnish
• Not suitable for professional or customer-facing marketing content

Best for:
Quick checks, informal use, personal understanding

2. DeepL Translator

Pros:

• Often produces more natural and fluent translations than Google
• Understands context better in full sentences
• Supports editing tone and formality (Pro version)

Cons:

• Makes mistakes with long compound words or idioms
• Especially in longer and more complex sentences the results are often abit unnatural
• Limited free usage
• Formal tone may feel stiff in some cases

Best for:
Blog posts, business emails, internal documents (needs to be edited still)

3. ChatGPT (with GPT-4 or plugins)

Pros:

• Can translate and explain meaning
• Allows you to give style and tone instructions
• Great for localizing marketing language with human prompts

Cons:

• Not a dedicated translation engine so you always need to tell it separately to translate the text, you can’t just paste and get the translation (unless you have instructed it so).
• May make factual or grammatical errors
• Is abit slower than dedicated translation tools

Best for:
Creative content, nuance-heavy copy, exploratory drafts

4. Microsoft Translator

Pros:

• Free, quick, and built into many Microsoft tools
• Reliable for common phrases

Cons:

• Less accurate and natural than for example DeepL
• Doesn’t handle tone or complexity well

Best for:
Simple UI strings, app interfaces, quick testing

5. Translate.com

Pros:

• Clean and beginner-friendly interface
• Offers both machine translation and human translation services
• Supports many type of texts, including medical and technical texts

Cons:

• Machine translations into or from Finnish are often abit clunky and grammatically incorrect
• Lacks natural tone and understanding of Finnish structure
• Lower quality than alternatives like DeepL or ChatGPT (with prompts)

Best for:
Quick testing or when you’re considering buying a human translation — but not for standalone Finnish machine translation

Which Translation Tool Do I use?

As a native Finn and fluent in English, I don’t that often use English-Finnish translation tools. Sometimes if I have a long document in English where I just need key points from, I upload it to ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the document to me in Finnish. ChatGPT’s Finnish has gotten significally better in the last year.

From the tools I tested for this blog post, I would recommend DeepL or ChatGPT for translating marketing texts into Finnish. They gave the most natural results, even though both had some clunkiness especially in longer sentences.

For personal use in case of languages I don’t know, I usually just use Google Translate. I trust that it gives me the meaning correctly even though it’s Finnish is a bit clunky.

Key Takeaways

• No automatic translation tool is perfect for Finnish. Yet anyways..
• DeepL and ChatGPT (with clear prompts) often give the most natural results — but they still need human review.
• For marketing, websites, and anything customer-facing, always proofread or localize manually.

Want your Finnish Marketing Translations to Sound Like a Real Human Wrote it?

I offer professional Finnish translation and localization for websites, apps, and marketing content. I also offer Finnish proofreading for reasonable prices and I am specialized in editing AI-translated marketing texts.

Message me at salli@tammivaara.com and let me know what kind of Finnish text are you looking to get translated or proofread ☺️

👉 Check out all my services here