frustration

'Guidelines for translation' gives this advice: "Respect placeholders. You will encounter placeholders for dynamic data. They will look like . Do not remove them, but figure out how to preserve their relationship with the surrounding text." But that is sometimes impossible without performing some violent acts and producing really ugly or grammatically incorrect sentences. Genitive form for example is not so simple in Finnish than in English. In English you can use this: 's, but not in Finnish. Very difficult to find a way to substitue ordinary genitive.

Another, even more difficult problem is that one and the same translation of a word is used in different places. In Finnish language we have different forms of the same word (inflectional morphology), for example the English word 'books' cannot be translated only into 'kirjat' but we need also 'kirjoja', 'kirjaa' and other inflectional forms in order to get sensible sentences. '5 books' cannot be '5 kirjat'.

I think there are lots of other languages that have the same kind of problems. One way to solve this problem is to avoid using the same translation in many places. It is handy in some languages, but not in all.

How Finnish words are put together
http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=25834