According to Finland’s association of booksellers, one in four books sold last year was in a foreign language, mostly English. The growing influence of BookTok, the TikTok reading community, has accelerated the trend: young Finns prefer to buy the English edition rather than wait for a Finnish translation so they can join online conversations. The shift is changing the market as it has become risky to invest in Finnish translations, because it is rare to obtain rights and complete a translation fast enough to publish alongside the English release. To keep up, some publishers are considering using artificial intelligence to speed translation, though the idea worries Finland’s traditionally respected human translators. The rise of English is a “Europe-wide phenomenon” linked to social media and global entertainment that also connects readers to the wider world, but for Finland’s small market — just 5.6m people — the change poses a serious challenge: whether Finnish-language fiction can stay visible in an era when even local readers increasingly reach for books written in English.
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