Tytti Suojanen awarded for her life’s work and reforming translator training
Suojanen has pioneered and created a new type of training programme on technical communication in Finland that leads to professional profiling and is well-suited to the needs of the labour market. She has overseen the construction, development and operation of the programme at Tampere University for more than 20 years.
Suojanen has also been a central developer of training in user-centered translation. She has been teaching user-centered translation and communication courses in Tampere for a decade, and today the courses are also offered to non-translation students.
Suojanen has been the first author to produce key educational material in the field of user-centered translation with Kaisa Koskinen and Tiina Tuominen. Published in 2012, the book Käyttäjäkeskeinen kääntäminen is available online and, with its learning assignments, can be implemented as such as a course, which increases the national impact of the material. User-Centered Translation published by Routledge in 2015 offers revised material for the international education markets. Suojanen’s latest innovation is to introduce the aspects of easy-to-read language and service design to user-centered communications training.
According to the prize criteria, Suojanen is a dynamic and inspiring teacher and thesis supervisor whose teaching highlights business cooperation and the development of professional and working life skills.
“It is a great pleasure to award Tytti Suojanen for her merits in teaching because she is an exemplary pioneer who has built cooperation between education and working life. In the recent years, working life relevance has become an important part of the general university rhetoric, but Suojanen has already firmly carried it out in practice for over 20 years in a manner that many other fields could learn from,” says Esa Penttilä, Chair of the education section of SKTL.
The Tiedon helmi prize includes steel artwork designed by Helle Damkjaer, which the prize-winner may keep until the next winner is announced, and a certificate of honour.
