Lexical borrowing in journalism in a time of political crisis

ABSTRACT This article examines lexical borrowing from Russian that takes the form of loanwords and loan translations, often in connection with an explanation of the concept, in Finnish journalistic writing. The material consists of news articles that were published in three major Finnish online news outlets in the three-month period (one month per news outlet) that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. During that time, with interest in Russian foreign politics growing and political tensions rising, news reporting on Russia also increased. The present study focuses on what was borrowed from Russian during that time and the kinds of translation strategies that were used by journalists to convey the meanings of Russian concepts to Finnish readers. Loanwords and loan translations are analyzed qualitatively and discussed from the point of view of the context of their use from December 2021 – February 2022. The results show that loanwords were not numerous and often did not appear to aim to emphasize the foreign aspect.


Introduction
This paper examines lexical borrowing that occurs in international journalism; more specifically, in Finnish journalism covering Russia during the three months preceding Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The goal of this article is to describe the kinds of concepts of Russian origin, or concepts that appear Russian in a specific context, that were conveyed to Finnish readers using loanwords and loan translations, and to discuss the possible reasons for choosing loanwords and calques as translation strategies in this particular historical context. An additional aim is to gain an understanding of how a political crisis involving a source culture (donor language) may reflect in lexical borrowing from that culture. Lexical borrowing, in its different forms, is a language-contact phenomenon typically regarded in translation studies as a translation strategy for source-culture-bound lexical items that have no counterpart in the culture and language of the translation. Such a definition implies that the use of this strategy in translation is likely in situations where there seems to be no other alternative, and when the source text contains a stimulus for it (as opposed to being used as an added stylistic solution). These translation strategies are likely to remind the target text readers of the foreignness of the concepts because loanwords and loan translations not only communicate information about a different culture, but they do it in a lexically noticeable way. Unintended or intentional stylistic effects may be produced, which can affect the image of the source culture in the minds of the readers (Riggs, 2018).
The material in this study is monolingual. This is explained, first, by the fact that cases of lexical borrowing can be identified with sufficient certainty from a monolingual text and, second, by the specific nature of international news texts. International journalism is inherently multilingual and relies heavily on translation and interpreting done by the journalists themselves or by other participants, such as fixers, interpreters, translators, and editors of the newswriting process. Journalism may be regarded as a profession that includes translating. Such non-professional translation by professionals from other fields may also be investigated as a form of translatoriality, defined by Koskela et al. (2017, p. 465) as 'a characteristic feature of multilingual communication in which a message carrier in one language can be identified as originating from a message carrier in another language.' As pointed out by Schäffner (2020, p. 121), news texts are often based on multiple oral and written sources and identifying the source texts of international news can be difficult. To examine journalistic translation as translatoriality allows us to see multilingual activities as something that is not bound to the relationship between a specific source text and its translation.
Lexical borrowings often distinctly denote source-culture objects and thus play a role in forming a picture of the source culture in the readers' minds. Riggs (2018, pp. 360-361, 368) sees journalists as cultural mediators. In her study based on a monolingual corpus compiled from two British newspapers, she found indications that a combination of stylistic choices, such as modality and the manner in which certain terms are used, can contribute to the journalistic representation of an event, a group of people, or a society. In a similar vein, Pan and Liao (2020, p. 723) argue that '[t]he translator's mediation, which may be subtle, could exert a critical impact on the attitude or position adopted by the target audience towards different parties involved in the news event.' In their investigation of a relabeling strategy used in news translation, they found evidence that the social and cultural context determines the translators' motivation to reposition the interpretation of the translation, for instance, by scaling down 'outrage' into 'anger' (Pan & Liao, 2020, p. 727, 734-735). In addition to studying such subtle deviations, it is also important to allow for the fact that translation does not need to involve a large source text. A source text may consist of just one or two words, but translating them may involve highly significant choices for the news outlet and for the target readers, as shown by Valdeón (2007). Martín (2000, p. 328) has also investigated the translation strategies for fairly small linguistic elements, namely, references to the institutions of the English-speaking world in Spanish newspapers. Translations of very small texts can and have been studied within translation studies, but a contact-linguistic approach offers insights that may complement the picture, especially of translatorial activity in situations which do not presume a tight ST-TT relationship.
International journalism can constitute an influential channel for introducing and diffusing loans. While translation studies focus on written and more designed than spontaneous communication that has a certain relationship to a presumed source text, contact linguistics' main area of interest is spoken interaction (see Kranich et al., 2011, p. 11). Within the study of language contacts, there have been calls to pay more attention to translation-induced language change (Kranich et al., 2011;McLaughlin, 2011) and written multilingual communication (Sebba, 2012, pp. 1-2). Kolehmainen and Skaffari (2016, pp. 129-130), who see many common characteristics especially between translation and code-switching, have encouraged collaboration between linguists and translation scholars in studying these phenomena in particular. The contact-linguistic codecopying framework has been applied to the study of translation by Malamatidou (2016) and, regarding journalistic translation, by McLaughlin (2015, who discovered in her corpus-based study that English loanwords are not frequently used in French news writing (McLaughlin, 2015, p. 557). The present study aims to contribute to these areas of research, however, with a qualitative approach.
Translation studies and contact linguistics share some concepts, such as loans, which are translation strategies as well as the possible results of language contacts. International journalists can be regarded as individuals who are in language contact, defined by Thomason (2001, p. 1) in its most simple form as 'the use of more than one language in the same place at the same time.' Long-distance contact is also possible through TV and other media, as well as solely through education (Thomason, 2001, pp. 2-3, 20). In the present study, the journalists are presumed to have been in language contact in gathering information for their articles, either by working in a Russian-speaking environment or remotely via the internet or other media, and through either spoken or written sources. Affected by such contact with the Russian language, they have ended up using loanwords or calques in their work (see e.g. Fawcett, 1997, pp. 34-36;Chesterman, 2000, p. 94, 108-110). They may also have resorted to explicitation or providing additional information to the readers to explain a foreign concept (Martín, 2000). At the end of the journalistic process, the international journalist's choices are made available to possibly very large audiences, thus providing them with a mediated language contact.
The objects of this study are the renderings of concepts that can be seen in Finnish journalism as typical of and, to a degree, restricted to Russian culture and that are thus candidates for lexical borrowing. Some of them may be old and conventionalized, but many can be expected to be new, as journalists are often among the first to introduce new concepts originating from the country from which they report to their readers in the target culture (Fawcett, 1997, p. 35). In the present study, I examine news articles published in Finnish media from December 2021 to February 2022 to explore the solutions Finnish journalists have come up with to fulfil this task for their Finnish audience.

Lexical borrowing in written multilingual professional communication
The approach taken in this study is that a journalist reporting on Russia in Finnish is in language contact most likely with the Russian language but also very likely with other languages, at least with English, which is an essential language in international news production. In addition, translation is considered a form of language contact (see Malamatidou [2016, pp. 399-400] for a list of studies using theories of language contact in translation research; also Kolehmainen & Riionheimo, 2016;McLaughlin, 2011McLaughlin, , 2015.
In the following sections, I will first give an overview of the basic concepts of lexical borrowing in translation studies and contact linguistics, and then present factors that may lead to lexical borrowing in present-day journalism.

Loans as a translator's tool and a contact-linguistic phenomenon
In translation studies, loanwords and loan translations (calques) are basic tools that can be used to translate culture-bound concepts. Leppihalme (2001, p. 141) calls borrowing a 'direct transfer of the foreign word', remarking that direct transfer can be used to create a foreignizing translation and be accompanied by explicitation or provision of information about the meaning. Fawcett (1997, p. 34) simply refers to a source-language form that is taken into the translation to fill a gap in the target language lexicon or for other reasons. According to Chesterman (2000, p. 94), both loans and calques are, as other translation strategies, 'a deliberate choice, not the unconscious influence of undesired interference.' Similarly, The Oxford Handbook of Contact Linguistics gives the following definitions for loan words: a pure loanword is defined as a word that is borrowed from the donor language into the host language as is, that is, with 'minimal changes in pronunciation and morphology' (Mott & Laso, 2020, p. 157). There appears to be no disagreement regarding the definitions of loan translation either, since Fawcett (1997, p. 35) sees it as a literal translation at the level of the phrase and Mott and Laso (2020, p. 158) see it as an instance of new meaning 'amalgamated with preexisting native morphology.' The contact-linguistic view on loans is focused on the language user, their language skills, and their linguistic and social environment. While language contact (Winford, 2020, pp. 51-53) has linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic dimensions, the locus of a linguistic innovation, such as a loanword, is the individual and their psycholinguistic process, serving as the point of diffusion of the innovation in their social network. A common direction of influence in language contact is from a person's stronger language (L1, usually the mother tongue) to their weaker language (L2), which, for instance, could be a language that they are learning (Paulasto et al., 2014). Directions and linguistic environments may vary a great deal. For instance, in translation it is often L2 that influences the linguistic features of the translation in L1 (Mauranen, 2005, p. 76), often in a way that is deemed negative, i.e. as interference. Paulasto et al. (2014, pp. 410-411) present a scheme that helps classify the vast array of contact-linguistic influence. It captures the psycholinguistic aspect of an individual speaker having a dominant language (usually L1) and distinguishes diachronic contact-induced change, with established and widely used forms from synchronic contact influence that appear in a multilingual individual's speech randomly or occasionally. The direction of influence in both established system changes and temporary and individual changes may be from L2 to L1 or vice versa. The temporary and individual contact influence, such as an individual act of borrowing, may have long-lasting effects on the target/receiving language, especially if it is diffused in literature or media.
Language contact such as translation happens in a social context and in an environment with colleagues, clients, and readers. It may therefore be useful to compare journalistic work, including the translation of even just one or two words, with that of other language professionals. Kolehmainen and Riionheimo (2016, pp. 1-2) regard literary translation as a language contact situation and suggest possible outcomes of such contact. Using corpora of original Finnish literary texts and texts translated into Finnish, they investigate whether the results of translational language contacts are similar to those of other language contacts. They also discuss possible differences that may exist between the contact effects in literary translation and in other forms of translation. There are at least two factors which may affect potential contact outcomes, and which seem similar to the journalistic process in which editors and proofreaders participate. First, literary translation is done by multilingual professionals, who are often trained in translation and used to monitoring and assessing their own output. Second, there are other professionals involved in the process, such as a publishing editor (Kolehmainen & Riionheimo, 2016, pp. 4-5). These factors suggest that using loanwords is indeed more deliberate than spontaneous in literary translation, a point also made by other scholars regarding translation. Despite some similarities between journalistic writing and literary translation, there are separating factors, such as the lack of a single, extensive source text in many forms of journalism, and the timetables that a literary translator and a journalist follow. The tight deadlines that are typical in news writing can lead to quicker, ad hoc solutions.

Reasons for lexical borrowing
The reasons for translating an element of the source-language material using a specific strategy are manifold. In literary translation, the popularity of loanwords appears to be connected to both source-culture and target-culture factors, as well as the specific features of the target audience. Together with the linguistic and psycholinguistic dimensions, they form the context in which borrowing takes place. In his study on Russian loanwords in Dutch translations of Russian novels, Van Poucke (2011) concludes that new literary genres and changes in publishing policies led to decreased numbers of loanwords in Dutch translations at the time of his study compared to the 1970s and 1980s. By loanwords, he refers to words which may be assimilated and widely used, but which are still recognized as loanwords (Van Poucke, 2011, pp. 104-105). Referring to Chesterman (2000, p. 94), Van Poucke (2011 is of the opinion that in literary translations, loanwords are mostly used to produce a stylistic effect rather than as a last resort because there is no alternative, as in a case of lacuna: '[…] the use of loanwords is a relatively provocative way to confront the reader with the foreignness or otherness of a text […]' (Van Poucke, 2011, p. 104). Van Poucke (2011, pp. 114-115) suggests that the diminishing numbers of Russian loanwords in Dutch translations in the 1990s could be explained by the changes in literary culture in Russia, with new genres appearing and the old Soviet themes and vocabulary gradually disappearing. According to him, another explanation could be that the Dutch publishers and audiences had adopted a preference for domesticating translations, which led to fewer loanwords being used by translators.
In her study of lexical borrowing from English in Spanish newspapers, Martín (2000) mentions the expectations regarding the existing knowledge and skills of the audience as one factor. Malamatidou (2000, pp. 329-330) discovered that the most common translation strategies were pure loans and literal renditions, but she also found many uses of combination strategies, such as a loan plus translation. She (Martín, 2000, pp. 336-337) concludes that the use of literal translations and loans reflects the fact that the average Spanish reader is expected to be familiar with both the English language and Anglo-American culture, which, however, does not apply to any other language or culture. Kaloh Vid (2017) provides a critical analysis of translation solutions based on expectations of the audience's prior knowledge and abilities to interpret historically and politically foreign concepts. She has analyzed the techniques used to translate Sovietisms occurring in a Russian novel for English audiences who are unfamiliar with most of them (Kaloh Vid, 2017, pp. 196-197). She defines Sovietisms as 'culturally-, historicallyand socially-specific terms from the Soviet speech of the 1930s brought into the Russian language through the discourse of revolution and the communist regime to describe different aspects of Soviet life' (Kaloh Vid, 2017, p. 179). She discovered that the translators had mostly used transliteration, calques or partial calques, intra-textual gloss, extra-textual gloss, and literal translation. She characterized these techniques as foreignizing (Kaloh Vid, 2017, p. 197). She also found that although the denotative meaning was conveyed in the translation, connotations may not have been transferred to the target readers. Connotation is also listed by Riggs (2018, p. 361) as a stylistic element possibly affecting the representation formed by a translation.
The timeframe of the present study coincides with the period of increasingly aggressive Russian foreign policy toward Ukraine, rising tensions in international politics, and eventually Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. During the three-month period, journalistic reporting on Russia increased significantly in another of its neighboring countries, Finland. Besides the increased volume of news about Russia, there are several reasons why it might be expected to find numerous Russian-based loans in Finnish international newswriting at that time. For instance, loans may produce a foreignizing effect on readers (or hide what is common between the cultures, as Martín [2000, p. 336] points out) and be used deliberately to that effect. There are several possible motivations for resorting to loans and other foreignizing translation strategies. According to Probirskaja (2009), they include: presenting a foreign culture benevolently, resisting conventions of the mainstream culture, upholding stereotypes, the other and the exotic, separating the foreign culture from one's own culture, keeping up one's own identity in relation to the foreign, faithful translation, the influence of the foreign mainstream culture and its ideology, or commonplace interference.' (Probirskaja, 2009: 174; my translation from Finnish).
From the reception point of view, they can rather be seen as effects on readers than as the author's motivations. In any case, at the time when Russia's behavior towards its neighboring country of Ukraine became increasingly threatening, some of the motivations listed by Probirskaja (2009) seem particularly relevant. Other reasons to use loanwords in translations could be translational incompetence and the confidence of the translator. 1 Research on language contact provides another set of potential reasons that, again, have a lot in common with those discussed in translation studies. They include shifting the power balance away from the monolingual norm, expressing one's identity, and constructing a hybrid identity among different cultural environments (Jonsson, 2012, p. 223ff). The various motivations may thus have roots ranging from the individual's translation strategies to their personal linguistic competence, history, and attitudes. The present study discusses the connection of a social feature, namely, political tensions, with the use of loans.

Material and method
The material in this study consists of instances of loanwords and loan translations, together with their immediate target-language co-text, found in news articles in the webservices of Ilta-Sanomat (is.fi; December 2021), Helsingin Sanomat (hs.fi; January 2022) and Yle.fi, the webservice of the Finnish National Broadcasting Company Yle (February 2022). Ilta-Sanomat and Helsingin Sanomat are two top daily newspapers in Finland according to the number of readers for the average print newspaper. According to Statistics Finland (2021), in 2020 their webservices reached 56% and 35%, respectively, of the population over 15 years, with yle.fi reaching 49% of the population. These webservices are free except for hs.fi whose content is partially behind a paywall. Both free and subscriber-only news was covered in this study.
While much of the earlier research has applied corpus methods, the present study looks at borrowed lexical items qualitatively. The search term venäjä 'Russia' was used to find news articles about Russia, resulting in a total of approximately 1,400 articles, of which more than half were from yle.fi in February 2022. Many of the articles did not concentrate on Russia, and only contained its name in a list of countries or, for instance, in sports results. Alternatively, a corpus-based method could have been used, utilizing word frequencies as an identifying factor, since loanwords are expected to have lower frequencies (see Peruzzo, 2019 for a methodological design for identifying loanwords). Loan translations may, however, be difficult to trace with a corpus-based method. Manually picking loans is, in any case, dependent on the researcher's attentiveness and knowledge of the source language.
As a result, a total of 106 different loanwords and what appeared to be loan translations (calques) were collected manually, together with the sentence they were used in. The collected items were then initially analyzed as to their degree of conventionalization as well as their meaning, revealing that about 50% of the items were translations of proper names, and another 50% were loan translations and loanwords used to convey the meaning of various concepts. Compared to the total number of approximately 1,400 articles examined, the number of loan translations and loanwords seems quite moderate. In further analysis, the items were studied in their co-text to consider possible motivations for their use, and to discuss the differences between contact-linguistic and translation studies approaches to the object of study. In the analysis, I use the term foreignization (Venuti, 1995) only in the sense of whether the loan appears to pay special attention to the Russian origin of the concept in question to emphasize foreignness. A 'neutral' translation is one that does not seem to be motivated by such an aim. My intent is to discuss both the authors' possible motivations to use a certain translation strategy and the effects the strategies may have on the average Finnish reader.

Analysis
The subject matter of the concepts translated by means of lexical borrowing were predominantly social, political, and military issues. The first set of loanwords represent a wellestablished layer of loans that are still recognized as originating from Russian and that may require explaining for some readers. They appear to be mostly neutral. Example 1. Niinistö perää EU:lta aktiivisempaa roolia Venäjän esitettyä ukaasejaan: 'Useamman jäsenmaan suvereniteettia on kyseenalaistettu'. (Liiten, HS, 1 Jan 2022) [Niinistö insists that the EU take a more active role after Russia presented its demands: 'The sovereignty of more than one member country has been put to question.'] 2 The word ukaasi is an old loanword from the Russian указ/ukaz, which denotes a normative decree. The Finnish word ukaasi is commonly used as a colloquial reference to demands and orders, and it has a slightly negative connotation. In the material, old loanwords that have been morphologically adapted to Finnish include duuma 'Duma' (from Russian дума/duma), pogromi 'pogrom' (погром/pogrom), and tsaari 'tsar' (царь/car'). I would argue that the Russian origin of these words is clear to most Finnish readers. They belong to a conventionalized group of Russian loans and probably create a small foreignizing effect.
Somewhat more recent loanwords are associated with the Soviet era, such as bolševikki 'bolshevik' (большевик/bol'ševik) and politbyroo 'politbureau' (политбюро/politbûro). The following example shows that the readers are sometimes expected to be unfamiliar with the Soviet-era vocabulary, in this case the concept of nomenklatura. Its use might then be motivated by a wish to emphasize the foreignness and the difference between cultures, or to educate the readers: Example 2. Neuvostoliitossa kutsuttiin nomenklatuuraksi kommunistisen puolueen ja turvallisuuspalveluiden johtomiehiä ja heidän pientä lähipiiriään. (Paananen, IS, 19.12.2021) [In the Soviet Union, members of the communist party and leaders of the security services, together with their small inner circle, were called the nomenklatura.] The result seems to be a text that simply states the facts and provides the readers with a piece of information about the topic. The Soviet era loanwords also include parts of compounds with a Finnish explanatory word, for instance, pakkokollektivisointi 'forced collectivization' (коллективизация/kollektivizaciâ) where pakko-means 'forced'. The political terms such as pakkokollektivisointi or politbyroo could currently be characterized as neutral conventionalized terms denoting historical facts. Yet another example of a loanword from this era is desantti (десантник/desantnik), which in Finnish refers to a 'Soviet paratrooper sent to engage in espionage and sabotage behind the enemy's rear in World War II' (Kielitoimiston sanakirja, s.v. desantti). It can also refer to the troops of the Russian or Soviet airborne forces. Contrary to some other Soviet terms that have been or become neutral, desantti has a highly negative connotation in Finland for historical reasons. It is an example of a word whose negative connotation may accentuate the cultural distance in a reader's mind in a context of political tension. Its connotation in Russian is probably quite different and could not be conveyed in Finnish without added information.
Two loanwords are especially current. Their analysis shows that a foreignizing effect may be created even if the origin of the loanword points to a different culture than the subject of the article, and that the source-culture origin may not be detected at all. The first of these words, disinformaatio 'disinformation' (дезинформация/dezinformaciâ), is an example of the latter. It originates from the Soviet era but only became a frequently used reference to knowingly misleading information in the mid-2010s, when the concept of information warfare entered Finnish public discourse. The word дезинформация/dezinformaciâ was originally coined in the Soviet Union, but due to its Latin feel, it is unlikely that Finnish readers associate it with Russia and Russian, but instead with English and an indeterminate cultural background.
The opposite process seems to have taken place with the term denatsifikaatio, 'denazification' (денацификация/denacifikaciâ). According to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the first known use of the English verb to denazify was in 1940. The origins of the term may be well be elsewhere, for instance, in the German language, from which Russian and other languages may have coined a loanword. However, when the material for this study was collected, the term was associated only with the actions of the Russian government. It probably created a strong foreignizing effect in the readers, but since there is no reasonable non-foreignizing alternative, the motivation for its use was likely to be to produce a faithful translation.
The last example from the Soviet or possibly even older era is the term provokaatio 'provocation' (провокация/provokaciâ). [The Ukrainian military intelligence warned on Friday that Russia will try to prepare a provocation near the border between Ukraine and Moldova. It specified that the provocation will probably be directed toward Russian troops […]. The provocation could be carried out in a way that would make Ukraine appear guilty of the setback that the Russian armed forces would encounter.] The source language of the news text is not known, but the text is about Russia, which alone creates a framework for interpreting the text. The word provokaatio is used with a meaning that is not typical in Finnish and which makes the reader struggle with the interpretation of this passage. In Finnish, provokaatio is derived from the verb provosoida that means roughly the same as the English verb to provoke. In Russian, however, the word is used to refer to what could also be called staging an event that is damaging to the opponent. With this meaning, the above example is easy to understand. The passage quoted has, then, a somewhat foreign feel, not as the result of a loanword from Russian, but instead as the result of a slight mistranslation of a familiar-sounding Latin-based term that has become, I would argue, a false friend.
Reports on current events additionally include the loanwords maršrutka 'marshrutka, a routed taxi' (маршрутка/maršrutka), the meaning of which is also explained to the readers, and oblasti 'oblast' (область/oblast') which is usually translated alue 'area' in Finnish. Loanwords with no adaptation to Finnish were aktivnost 'being active' (активность/aktivnost'), maskirovka 'military deception' (маскировка/maskirovka), and spetsnaz-erikoisjoukot 'spetsnaz special forces' (войска специального назначения/vojska special'nogo naznačeniâ) which is a combination of a loanword and near-literal translation. The use of these loanwords seems to have been brough about by the fact that they are short and easy to pronounce for Finns, which makes them good candidates for loanwords. There were, however, good target-language options that the translator could have used. Therefore, the use of loanwords may be regarded as an attempt to accentuate the Russian origin of the concepts. The word oblasti suggests that an English source might have been used as material, because the Russian loanword oblast is used in English in this context.
Most of the borrowings were words and phrases that refer to history and politics while words depicting daily life, like maršrutka, were rare exceptions.
Next, I will present cases where loan translations were used in the material.
Example 4. Venäjä on tuonut Ukrainan rajan tuntumaan yli satatuhatta sotilasta. Se on myös uhkaillut Eurooppaa toimilla, joita se kutsuu 'sotilaallis-teknisiksi'. (Väntönen, HS, 19 Jan 2022) [Russia has brought more than a hundred thousand troops close to the Ukrainian border. It also has threatened Europe with measures that it calls 'military-technical.'] Example 4 shows a literal translation of the adjective sotilaallis-tekninen 'military-technical' (военно-технический/voenno-tehničeskij). The meaning of the adjective was not made clear even in the source language, so the translating journalists did not really have any other alternative than to use a word-for-word translation. The use of compound adjectives with a hyphen is possible but infrequent in Finnish. Together with the unclear meaning of the word, this creates a slight sense of strangeness but not specifically of 'Russianness'. Here, the quotation marks express the fact that this is a quote, but quotation marks may also be used to stress the foreign origin of the word (see example 6).
Example 5. Pahaksi onneksi asevoimien ja turvallisuuselinten johtajat ja muut niin sanotut voimamiehet eivät presidenttiä kovin innokkaasti totelleet. Itse asiassa 'piilottelivat tai kääntyivät suoraan vastustamaan' presidenttiä. (Hakala, HS, 9 Jan 2022) [Unfortunately, leaders of the armed forces and security organizations and other so-called men of strength/power were not eager to obey the president. In fact, they 'were hiding or turned against ' the president.] In example 5, the journalist has referred to the politically influential group of people often known as the siloviki (силовики/siloviki) with 'the leaders of the armed forces and security organizations and other so-called men of strength/power' (my translation from Finnish). The journalist, or other professionals involved in the editing process, could have used the word silovikit which is quite common in Finnish texts in this context, but instead they chose an expression which explains who those people are. The possibility to emphasize foreignness was therefore not utilized. In another article, the word used for the siloviki in Finnish was voimaviranomaiset ('officials of strength/power'). There, too, the possibility to stress the cultural divide was not exploited. The material contains instances of calques together with an explanation of the culturespecific term, resulting in a neutral translation, as shown in example 6: Example 6. Venäjällä puhutaan nykyisin 'puhelinoikeudesta', eli oikeuden tuomari saa puhelimitse ohjeet joko suoraan Kremlistä tai turvallisuuspalveluista. (Paananen, IS, 19 Dec 2021) ['Telephone justice', nowadays a topic of conversation in Russia, means that a judge gets directions by phone either straight from the Kremlin or from the security services.] Proper names are sometimes translated literally, sometimes simply transliterated. In example 7, both strategies were employed: Example 7. Tänä vuonna pääsotaharjoitus on nimeltään Vostok-2022 eli Itä-2022. Viimesyksyinen harjoitus oli nimeltään Zapad-2021 eli Länsi-2021, ja se toi harjoitukset myös Suomen rajan tuntumaan. (Pöntinen & Sulasma, YLE, 10 Feb 2022) [This year the main military exercise is called Vostok-2022, or East-2022. The exercise of last autumn was called Zapad-2021, or West-2021, and it brought the exercises also near the Finnish border.] Here, the names of the exercises are given in both the foreign-language (transliterated) form and in the target language. It could be seen as an approach that highlights foreignness in a neutral, educational manner, neither emphasizing nor hiding it.
Example 8 is a rare occasion of a cultural allusion and, as such, is not strictly a loan. It illustrates the shared ability of loans and allusions to direct the reader's attention to the source (donor) culture. The example is a caption for a photograph in the news text. The question Mistä tunnet sä ystävän? is a reference to the Soviet poet and songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky's song Песня о друге/Pesnâ o druge 'Song about a friend'. It is well known in Finnish translation, and many readers are likely to spot the allusion. For them it may serve as a textual element that emphasizes foreignness, possibly in an ironic way. Those who do not make the connection to the Russian song will notice the colloquial pronoun sä 'you' (instead of sinä) and the reverse word order typical of poetry.

Concluding remarks
In the present study, I set out to investigate the use of Russian loans in Finnish journalism at a time of political and military tensions and Russia's increasing aggression toward Ukraine to better understand the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in journalism. In another of Russia's neighbors, Finland, the use of loanwords in journalistic texts about Russia was found to be limited almost exclusively to historical, political, and military concepts, leaving a very small role for concepts related to, for instance, food and other aspects of everyday life. The use of loans could have been frequent, as loanwords are thought to have a foreignizing effect that can bring out and emphasize what is different and even to hide what is common between the two cultures. However, the material examined points to a moderate use of loanwords and loan translations or literal translations. This raises the question of why journalists, as loci of linguistic innovation (Winford, 2020, pp. 51-53;Fawcett, 1997, p. 35), would not include more Russiansounding words and expressions in their texts at a time when the audience was likely to be psychologically and socially receptive to textual elements that could accentuate the differences between the two countries.
There are several possible explanations for this. The first two stem from the pre-war political situation: As pointed out by Probirskaja (2009), a foreignizing translation strategy does not necessarily highlight differences in a negative manner. Quite the opposite; a loanword could, in a threatening situation, be considered as paying too much attention to the language and culture of the opposing side. Second, many of the news texts from the research period focused on politics and military issues that are in many respects international, not culture-specific. Third, readers expect journalistic texts to provide information, but also to be a fluent read, which leaves limited space and time for educating the readers about new concepts. Fourth, journalism is expected to be objective and neutral, to describe differences instead of emphasizing them.
A fifth reason is connected to language skills and also to the prestige that a source culture may enjoy in a target culture. Despite the fact that Finland and Russia are neighbors, few Finns speak Russian. Most readers would therefore be unable to understand Russian loanwords without explanation, which could discourage the journalist from using them. The low prestige of a source culture, as experienced by readers in the target culture, may also be expected to have a similar effect.
Many of the loanwords and loan translations encountered in today's news media may remain instances of temporary and individual language contact-induced usage by a journalist, but some of them may survive, if not in people's everyday speech, then in history books and other specialized texts. Further studies, possibly using quantitative corpusbased methods complemented by interviews and observation, are thus needed to provide us with a better understanding of the process of lexical borrowing through mediated language contact in journalism.

Notes
1. Finnish journalists often add the statement "translated freely" in a passage that they have translated into Finnish. That may indicate a lack of confidence in one's competence as a translator. 2. All English translations in brackets are my translations from Finnish. They are meant to be more literal than fluent.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Nina Havumetsä is a university lecturer in translation (Russian to Finnish) at the University of Eastern Finland. She holds a PhD in translation studies awarded at the University of Helsinki in 2012. Her current research interests include translation in journalism, the translation of nonfiction, and translation norms.