Alice Martin has happy memories of the University of Helsinki, but less than happy ones, too. She has mixed feelings about the reception some of the teachers and other students gave her as a bilingual.

“Language is our identity, and the identity of a bilingual person is vulnerable both ways. Naturally one’s English skills came under scrutiny in the English department, and in the Finnish department some teachers questioned my Finnish because they knew my background. It was a mild case of intolerance. We all have our own idiolect, after all. Fortunately I toughened up over time.

A fieldwork excursion with the Finnish department to Kesälahti in the east of Finland, on the other hand, left her with only pleasant memories:

“I spent the time cycling around Kesälahti, hunting for conjunctions and clitics. Well, actually we visited people's homes, recorded their speech, and in the evenings we transcribed what they’d said. Then you picked out your assigned language phenomena and wrote them on file cards. My collection is probably still safe somewhere in the Morphology Archives.”

“The dialect excursion taught me an important thing concerning future work: written speech is miles away from actual speech, which is discontinuous, repetitive and hesitant, something no one could bear to read. That’s why writers and translators must have the skill to create a credible illusion of spoken language.”

Matters of speech were one thing, the study of old language forms another.

“When I’d advanced to professor Matti Rissanen’s courses in Old English, I remember thinking "now this is the real thing". For instance, reading Beowulf in the original was amazing. Knowledge of Old English and its metre is something I’ve later found useful when translating Tolkien's poems.”

Beowulf also came in handy when translating parts of Eino Leino's Helkavirret (‘Whitsun hymns’) into English in the English proseminar of the ever-inspiring Andrew Chesterman. Martin recalls how warmly she was welcomed years later when returning as an older student. The staff urged her to finish her studies.

“They treated adult students well in the department. Getting things done was fairly easy and I felt I was helped in every way. Professor Ritva Leppihalme from the English department kept urging me to complete my degree. Eventually I took part in her English dissertation seminar by mail from Hungary, where I was on maternity leave. Professor Auli Hakulinen also encouraged me to keep going.”