Pekka Kujamäki

Military history and translation studies: Shifting territories, uneasy borders

Both translation studies and military history are disciplines which occupyradically shifting territories, and it has been at their currently uneasy bordersthat this conversation on transdisciplinarity has been conducted. Themove from culturally as well as socially visible translational contexts tonon-hegemonicsocial actors and ordinary lives provides us with a space inwhich the traditional monolingual assumptions of military history can bechallenged, and in which the military terrain as a space of encounter can bereimagined as a linguistically embodied landscape. Combining the historian’sconcern to take account of the particularities of any situation with the translationscholar’s desire to address the multilingualism of war potentially movesthese disciplines beyond their traditional frontiers, forcing both of them tograpple with the messiness and disruptions which characterise any war andconflict ‘on the ground’.

Mediating for the Third Reich: On Military Translation Cultures in World War II in Northern Finland

Finland was involved in three military conflicts in World War II: the Winter War (1939-40), the Continuation War (1942-4) and the so-called Lapland War. Unlike the Winter War against the USSR, in which international support had been minimal, Finland started the second war as an ally of Nazi Germany in its offensive to the East, that is, in Operation Barbarossa. In Finnish Lapland, the cooperation created an exceptional wartime context, ‘a Finnish-German zone, in which the military leadership was in the hands of the Germans but the civilian administration in those of the Finns’ (Lahteenmaki 1999: 241).1 Three years later, in autumn 1944, this alliance turned into a Finnish-German confrontation on Finnish territory, the so-called Lapland War, as the peace terms imposed by the USSR dictated that Finnish troops must drive the Germans out of Northern Finland.