Translate an Excel file into Finnish

What Finnish changes in a spreadsheet

Finnish is not related to English, French, German or any other Indo-European language. It is agglutinative: where English strings several words together, Finnish often welds them into one long word. “Customer satisfaction survey” becomes Asiakastyytyväisyyskysely; “delivery time” becomes Toimitusaika. In a spreadsheet this has two practical effects.

• Labels that cannot break. Wrapped text breaks at spaces, and a 25-letter compound has none. A header that fitted on two lines in the source may overflow its column in Finnish.
• Language-specific letters. Finnish uses ä and ö (and å in names of Swedish origin). If the workbook is later exported to CSV or read by another system, make sure the encoding keeps them.

Finnish has no articles and no grammatical gender, but it has fifteen cases: the same word takes a different ending depending on its role. Lontoo (London) becomes Lontoossa (in London) or Lontooseen (to London). A label on its own in a cell is translated in the form that suits its context, which is not always the dictionary form.

Finnish number conventions use a decimal comma and a space as thousands separator (1 234,50 €), and dates are written day first with full stops: 12.3.2025. Month and weekday names are lower case: maaliskuu, maanantai.

Formulas, joined-up text and plurals: the Finnish trap

Manuce does not touch formulas: a calculated cell keeps its formula and keeps calculating. That is exactly what you want for a sum or a lookup. It also means that any text written inside a formula stays in the source language. A cell containing ="Total: "&B12 will still show “Total:” rather than Yhteensä.

Finnish makes this kind of string-building even more fragile than most languages:

• Cases. A formula such as ="Sales in "&A2 assumes a name can be dropped into a sentence unchanged. In Finnish the city itself would need a new ending (Helsingissä, not “Helsinki”). No simple concatenation can do that.
• Plurals. Finnish has only two plural categories, “one” and “other”, but after numbers above one the noun stays singular in a special case, the partitive: 1 tuote, 5 tuotetta. A formula that appends “s” or glues “items” after a number cannot produce this.

Before uploading, find these cells. The simplest fix is usually to put the fixed text in its own cell (“Total” in A12, the amount in B12): the text cell gets translated and the formula keeps working.

What you get back from Manuce, and what it does not do

You receive your original .xlsx with the Finnish text in place of the source text. Column widths, colours, borders, number formats, filters and merged cells are preserved. Numbers, dates and amounts are left as they are. You also get a Word version, a PDF and plain text, handy for having a Finnish-speaking colleague review the wording without sending them the workbook.

What is not done, worth knowing before you order:

• Sheet tab names are not translated. A tab called “Summary” keeps that name; rename it yourself (for example Yhteenveto) and check that formulas referring to it follow.
• Cell comments, charts, shapes and text boxes placed on the sheet stay in the source language, so chart titles and legends need redoing.
• Columns are not widened. With long Finnish compounds, a label may be cut off on screen, just as it could be in the original.
• No sworn or certified translation. If a Finnish authority requires a certified translation of a table, you will need a sworn translator.

Finnish carries a surcharge: a ×1.25 coefficient applies to the per-word rate, whichever level you choose.

Preparing the workbook and checking the Finnish version

A few minutes of preparation prevent most surprises.

• Dates as real dates. A date typed as text (“12 March 2025”) is a text cell: it will be translated (12. maaliskuuta 2025), not reformatted. A genuine date value stays a value and displays according to its cell format.
• Sorted lists. A list sorted alphabetically in the source will not be sorted once translated. In Finnish, å, ä and ö come after z. Re-sort if order matters, checking that formulas pointing at those rows still hold.
• Terms to keep unchanged. Product codes, brand names, internal references: check them in the free sample, then in the delivered file.

Once delivered, open each sheet and look at the headers first, since that is where compounds overflow. Widen columns or turn on text wrapping where needed. Then recalculate and compare two or three totals with the original: they should be identical.

In practice

1. Move any text written inside formulas into separate text cells.
2. Upload the .xlsx to Manuce and choose Finnish: the quote appears straight away.
3. Read the free sample, paying attention to terms that must stay unchanged.
4. After payment, download the translated .xlsx, the Word version, the PDF and the plain text.
5. Widen narrow columns, rename the tabs and redo charts and comments.