An opportunity for what? Genre literature is already translated into Finnish, and the publishers with something that isn’t Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings are mostly able to stick around, but probably aren’t making big profits. Finnish-written SF or fantasy is mostly crap and sinks without a trace. A good indication of the general level of quality is that for the first 20 years of the Atorox prize for the best Finnish SF short story, two outlier authors won ten of the 20 awards. No one has even been able to earn a full-time living writing SF in Finnish, not to mention growing rich.
Of course there’s nothing preventing someone from writing stuff on par with Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer in Finnish, but why bother? The book could be a cult classic but probably not a mainstream hit, and there aren’t enough non-mainstream Finnish-speaking buyers for a book to earn someone a living.
I don’t even know who buys all the translated Finnish SF books. I’ve read a bunch of those from the library, but almost all of the books I’ve bought have been in English. Why bother with translations that are both more expensive than the original paperbacks and have clunkier language?
An opportunity for what? Genre literature is already translated into Finnish, and the publishers with something that isn’t Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings are mostly able to stick around, but probably aren’t making big profits. Finnish-written SF or fantasy is mostly crap and sinks without a trace. A good indication of the general level of quality is that for the first 20 years of the Atorox prize for the best Finnish SF short story, two outlier authors won ten of the 20 awards. No one has even been able to earn a full-time living writing SF in Finnish, not to mention growing rich.
Of course there’s nothing preventing someone from writing stuff on par with Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer in Finnish, but why bother? The book could be a cult classic but probably not a mainstream hit, and there aren’t enough non-mainstream Finnish-speaking buyers for a book to earn someone a living.
I don’t even know who buys all the translated Finnish SF books. I’ve read a bunch of those from the library, but almost all of the books I’ve bought have been in English. Why bother with translations that are both more expensive than the original paperbacks and have clunkier language?