It is unlikely that an assiduous researcher has many moments in his career when a problem he has long been wrestling with is suddenly resolved. I had one such moment on March 6, 1989. But first some background.

I have led over 40 research and development projects, often collaborating with Kimmo Koskenniemi. The largest were the Centres of Excellence on computational linguistics. Thanks to Terhi Rissanen, a project carried out between 1982 and 1984 resulted in a general description of Finnish Sign Language.

As a professor in a small field, you have to stretch yourself thin. The most important thing is the success of your students and their finding suitable employment.

For seven years I was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Collaboration with the Head of Administration, Leena Barros, ran seamlessly. My Deanship ended in 2003. Those seven years saw performance negotiations with 19 departments. These events were colourful, to say the least. Once a disappointed departmental representative came into my office to declare that “the Dean is acting like a Mafioso.”

Between 1991 and 1992 I led a project to evaluate the examination system used in the humanities. The project involved preparing for the changes brought on by the new degree ordinance. The 1994 changes to the examination system in were considerable: we scrapped the degree programmes introduced in 1980, started to grade basic, intermediate and advanced studies separately once more, brought back the BA degree in the humanities, and removed compulsory general studies. Many of these changes anticipated the Bologna Process, which came some years later.

I became an emeritus professor about three years ago. Since 2013 I have been the chairman of Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. I am also the vice chairman of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, and starting in 2016 I will be the chairman. Kimmo Koskenniemi and I have both signed on as professors at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki, and we share an office on the fourth floor of the Metsätalo building.

Should you invest in subtitling if the television shows are rubbish? What does a language entrepreneur think is wrong with the way translators are trained? Would a translator who resigned from MTV3, a Finnish commercial television station, recommend the field to upper secondary school students?