# Translating "to" and "from" in Finnish turned out to be hard…

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/translating-to-and-from-in-finnish-turned-out-to-be-hard/212001>\
**Category:** Rails I18n\
**Created:** [September 19, 2011, 8:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/translating-to-and-from-in-finnish-turned-out-to-be-hard/212001 "2011-09-19T20:00:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![luislavena](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/0ea827/32.png) [@luislavena](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/luislavena)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 8:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/translating-to-and-from-in-finnish-turned-out-to-be-hard/212001/1 "2011-09-19T20:00:47Z")

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Hi,

I’m not even sure what the grammatical name for this is, but we ran into  
problems translating “to” and “from”, as in “to Eva” or “from Eva”.

In Finnish, our translator tells us the correct translations are  
“Evalle”  
and “Evalta” respectively. How would you handle this case? Does the I18n  
module provide a way to build some sort of inflector that can be used  
here?  
Maybe we could leave the translation of “to” empty in Finnish, but run  
the  
name through an inflector

Has anyone else run into something like this?

- Martin

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**Author:** ![msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b5a626/32.png) [@msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/msojka)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 8:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/translating-to-and-from-in-finnish-turned-out-to-be-hard/212001/2 "2011-09-19T20:48:23Z")

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The grammatical term is noun cases. See my previous  
[http://groups.google.com/group/rails-i18n/browse\_thread/thread/f20a181cdeed130e](http://groups.google.com/group/rails-i18n/browse_thread/thread/f20a181cdeed130e).

What we ended up doing at Bukowskis was to have the translator  
rephrase so we didn’t have to inflect the place names (in our case).  
Something like “To: Eva” instead of “To Eva” might be enough.

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**Author:** ![msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b5a626/32.png) [@msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/msojka)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 10:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/translating-to-and-from-in-finnish-turned-out-to-be-hard/212001/3 "2011-09-19T22:03:21Z")

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Thanks, Henrik. We’ll talk it over with the translators.

There’s no shortage of hard problems to solve in the i18n-space…

- Martin

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**Author:** ![msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b5a626/32.png) [@msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/msojka)\
**Post date:** [March 13, 2012, 12:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/translating-to-and-from-in-finnish-turned-out-to-be-hard/212001/4 "2012-03-13T12:36:58Z")

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Dear Henrik. We’ll gossip it in excess of with the translators.

There’s no scarcity of solid problems to resolve in the i18n-space.

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