Interpreting Brothers-in-War.

From 1941 to 1944, a period known in Finland as the Continuation War, Finland joined the German Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union and became the military ally of the Third Reich. The presence of over 200,000 German soldiers on Finnish territory formed a FinnishGerman zone, in which the German Army was strongly dependent on cooperation with Finnish military units, local authorities, and civilians. This required coordinated measures and resources for language mediation. Hence, the military alliance and the proximity of Finnish soldiers and civilians to foreign soldiers soon transformed into a patchwork of translation spaces: Translation and interpreting resources became a prerequisite for social encounters, both military and civilian, and, as such, called for attention on both sides of the alliance. The book translation of the authors Finnish monograph (2023) presents the first in-depth analysis of the Finnish soldiers and civilians operating in these translation spaces. Its focus is on the network of Finnish interpreters and liaison officers of the Finnish Liaison Staff in Rovaniemi (henceforth: FLSR). Assigned to staffs of the German army units, their task was to support communication between the two armies, to assist German troops in daily matters, and also to provide the Finnish High Command with observations about the German ally - all this suggesting a broad task profile of soldiers, interpreters, fixers, and spies. Moreover, the personnel of the FLSR ended up interpreting Finland for the German ally. As representatives of the Finnish Army, they were the immediate contact persons to explain local life and sentiments about the war, and to negotiate ideological issues or differences in cultural practices, including the two military cultures. Such cultural translation was done primarily ad hoc and was only later supported by FLSR-coordinated propaganda among the German troops. The civilian mediation practices complement the picture. The official structures proved insufficient from the onset of the alliance, which forced German lower-level units to resort to civilians as translating and interpreting resources. In the book, experiences of three female civilians illustrate these measures and the agency of civilians in German units. The reconstruction of military interpreters and liaison officers tasks and mediation agency is based on their war-time weekly reports while the account on civilian interpreters experiences is shaped from a variety of autobiographical texts, including interviews. In all, the account offers a translation historians view into multilingual encounters of the Finnish-German brotherhood-in-arms - a focus that, until recently, has received little attention in the Finnish military historiography.