All English websites of Finnish export companies are not translations, and some are, rather, independent texts with maybe only little resemblance to the Finnish websites.
Particularly large companies1, which are often also multinational, seem to use complete-ly different strategies in constructing their Finnish and English websites. As the Finnish and English websites of these companies include completely different information, translational study is not relevant or even possible there. Small Finnish companies2 do not necessarily have English websites at all, or they may have translated only small parts of their websites into English. Moreover, they are only rarely concerned with ex-porting as the majority of their clientele usually consists of people living in Finland. It is, therefore, usually sufficient for them to have websites only in Finnish. The situation
1 A large company is a company of which annual turnover is more than 43 million Euros and the number of employees over 250 (Yritystukitilasto, company support statistics 2008, my translation).
2 A small company is a company whose annual turnover remains under 10 million Euros and the number of employees under 50 (Yritystukitilasto, company support statistics 2008, my translation).
is, however, different within medium-sized companies3 as they use more often the Finn-ish website as the source text for their EnglFinn-ish websites. Small and medium-sized com-panies are often referred to with the abbreviation SMEs. All the comcom-panies, whose web-sites were studied in the present study, can be categorised as medium-sized companies.
In the present study, five Finnish medium-sized export companies, Iivari Mononen Oy, Laine-Tuotanto Oy, Merivaara Oy, Suomen Kuitulevy Oy and Vexve Oy, were chosen as material on the following criteria. All the five companies are founded in Finland, and their headquarters and production lines are located in Finland as well. This has been an important selection criterion. It is sometimes difficult to define whether a company with a Finnish name is actually Finnish when its headquarters and production lines are geo-graphically located somewhere else. It is, however, common that Finnish export com-panies have subsidiaries in their export countries, but if the headquarters are located in an English speaking environment, features of ELF and translationese would not proba-bly occur on the corporate websites as the creators of the English websites can even be native speakers of English.
Iivari Mononen Oy, whose headquarters are located in Joensuu, in the East of Finland, manufactures impregnated wood products used, for instance, in infrastructure (IM 2011). Suomen Kuitulevy Oy produces hardboard products used in building and in door and furniture manufacturing. The headquarters of the company are located in Heinola, in the South of Finland. (SK 2011.) Laine-Tuotanto Oy, located in Vaasa, on the West coast of Finland, manufactures different mechanical engineering and electro-technical products (LT 2011). Vexve Oy, whose headquarters are located in Sastamala, in the South of Finland, manufactures different valves used in district heating and cooling (VX 2011), and Merivaara Oy manufactures and sells different medical equipment. The headquarters of the company are located in Lahti, in the South of Finland (MV 2010).
3 A medium-sized company is a company of which annual turnover remains between 10 and 43 million Euros and the number of employees between 50 and 249 (Yritystukitilasto, company support statistics 2008, my translation).
The websites of the above mentioned companies were chosen as the data for the present study because they met the selection criteria, that is, their headquarters and production lines are located in Finland, they are medium-sized export companies, and their Finnish and English websites contained similar information. When searching for appropriate research material, the city website of Vaasa, which listed the export companies in the Ostrobothnian area, was visited in order to find companies that would meet the above mentioned criteria. However, the only company listed on the Vaasa city website, who met the criteria, was Laine-Tuotanto Oy. Many of the companies listed were large com-panies or their headquarters were located abroad. It was, therefore, inevitable that the geographical location of the company could not be the selection criteria. For this reason, the website of Kauppalehti4 was visited. This website listed all the successful Finnish export companies. The four other companies (IM, MV, SK and VX) were listed on this website and since they met the selection criteria, their websites were regarded as suita-ble material for the present study.
All the companies, whose websites were included in the data, are regarded here as ex-port companies although the proex-portion of exex-ports from the annual turnover differs sig-nificantly between the companies. Approximately 12 % of the annual turnover of Laine-Tuotanto in 2010 came from exporting (Laine 2011). The proportion of exports from the annual turnover was significantly higher for Merivaara Oy as approximately 85 % of their annual turnover came from exporting (Könönen 2011). The proportion of exports from the annual turnover was also relatively high for Vexve Oy: 80 % of the annual turnover comes from exports (Huhtala 2011). The proportion of exports for Iivari Mo-nonen is approximately 50 % from the annual turnover (Monni 2011), and the corre-sponding number was approximately 60 % for Suomen Kuitulevy Oy (Lind 2011). In what follows, the corporate websites forming the data of the present study are intro-duced.
4 Kauppalehti is the largest commercial economic medium in Finland that informs of and analyses current economic occurrences (Kauppalehti 2012, my translation).