Pirjo Kukkonen is the first professor of Swedish translation studies in both Finland and the world. Translation simultaneously requires the intricate detail of lace knitting and mastery of broad subjects. Only when the translator or translation scholar begins to study the source text under a magnifying glass are the smallest hidden meanings of the text revealed. Translation is archaeology, curiosity, detective work, seeking and finding.

Kukkonen has conducted research, among other topics, on how concepts are analysed: how science, knowledge, peace, silence and love receive their meaning. In studying the translation of song lyrics and texts from popular culture, she has, from the 1980s onwards, investigated culture clashes and the nomadic life of songs by studying Finnish song culture, world music, including the tango, fado and flamenco and their lyrics, and how the lyrical verse in the collection of Finnish folk poetry The Kanteletar is translated into Swedish. Her greatest task, however, has been the study of how modernist texts like those of Volter Kilpi translate into Swedish.

Translation, as a phenomenon, is a fundamental category of semiotics. In the field of translation, the focus of Kukkonen’s research has been the translation and interpretation of culture, which has its roots in philology – filo and logos ‘the love of words and language.’ Early philology was in fact the precise interpretation and understanding of texts, textual criticism, textual functions and stylistics in relation to the text as a whole, and the context of society and culture. Consequently, Kukkonen is proud to use the epithet of philologist in language and translation studies and semiotics alike.

Kukkonen is specialised in cultural and social semiotics and, in terms of translation, cultural and literary translation, the translation of song lyrics (vocal translation), audio-visual translation and television and film translation. Some of her largest projects have been historical research, culminating in her doctoral dissertation, on the concept of science and the development of scientific and academic language (1989), her study of the Swedish translation of The Kanteletar (2009) and her study of the Swedish translations of the works of Volter Kilpi (2014). The largest project in which she is currently engaged is Fack och fiktion: Finlands svenska översättningshistoria 1800–2000 (‘The history of Swedish translations in Finland 1800–2000’), which investigates how translation has created collective memory and transferred cultural heritage.

Kukkonen is a pioneer in the study of song translation (vocal translation). In her work Tango Nostalgia (1996, 2nd edition 2003), she analyses tango lyrics from the 1800s onwards, both original and translated. Her study on the Swedish translations of The Kanteletar led to the work Det sjungande jaget (2009, ‘The Singing I’).

As a teacher and researcher, Kukkonen sees language as a powerful force in the humanities and as a philosophy in science and research. The aesthetics and rhythm of language and literature for their part are nourished by art and music. Kukkonen began by studying satire from the perspective of linguistics and stylistics, until semantics, questions of meaning, began to interest her, i.e., how concepts move in time and space and describe history and cultural history.

The next step on the path of the study of meaning was semiotics, the general study of signs, meaning and communication. That is, how we use, create, understand and interpret not only linguistic signs but all signs in human communication as part of a broader system of signs, such as studies on linguistically and culturally dependent phenomena, like the musical genre tango and silence as phenomenon, have demonstrated. In the study of translation, multidisciplinary semiotics, like social and cultural semiotics, describes and explains all of the diverse signs that construct culturally produced, complex texts.