I first studied at the Helsinki School of Economics, and it was at that institution that I also found my first long-term post. Over time the need for an interdisciplinary approach became clear, and the use of language had to be considered in a wider social context. The first research project I was involved in, which was partly funded by the Academy of Finland, studied the cultural differences between German and Finnish business communications (1988-1991). How cultural stereotypes were handled in the interview process turned out to be more interesting than the actual differences we found. In another project funded by the Academy the subject was interaction in Finnish and German television debates (1996-99). My business school background led to the compilation, in collaboration with Outi Steuer, of a comprehensive electronic German-Finnish-German business communication dictionary based on textual corpora.

Interculturality and the meeting of cultures remained an interest of mine when I became professor of German translation at the University of Tampere. In a project studying social styles and institutional interaction during cross-cultural contacts (Academy of Finland, 2003–2006), we first gathered video material from an international fair, and then analysed conversations between Finns and Germans. In Tampere, too, crossing the boundaries between disciplines, particularly with social scientists, was in many ways rewarding, and beneficial to the research. The Speech Text project, funded by the Academy of Finland (2009–12), was also based on interdisciplinary collaboration. The project studied speech-to-text interpreting using methods from translation studies, linguistics, and computer sciences. The project was initiated at the request of the Finnish Federation of Hard of Hearing, who wished to assess the comprehensibility of speech-to-text interpreting. Speech-to-text interpreting is a service aimed at the deaf and the hard of hearing, where speech and other relevant audible information is transmitted into visible text in real time.

Subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) became part of my research at the University of Helsinki. New research questions have led to collaboration with the researchers on speech recognition and visual content analysis at Aalto University, and they continuously test the limits of my own knowledge and understanding. If you want to offer answers to research questions that arise from society at large, interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary, as is working together with professionals from various fields. Within my own field, these include translators, interpreters, and related organisations.

In my research projects, I have looked at communication as a multimodal whole where language is intertwined with other means of communication in human interaction. It is also interesting how the same thing can be expressed through different means when one avenue of communication is closed off, for example by verbalising visual information, as is done in audio description.