Glossaries and guidance

The Government’s terminology work aims to promote clear communication and to harmonise the terms used in different languages in government texts.

Glossaries are compiled in cooperation with experts from different administrative branches. The glossaries produced through major cooperation projects contain between 150 and 900 concepts. They usually include definitions of concepts and terms in different languages, along with other descriptions of content and diagrams illustrating the relationships between concepts. These glossaries are published in the Government Termbank Valter or as separate publications. 

The Prime Minister’s Office also compiles narrower glossaries on topical issues. The purpose of these glossaries is to offer recommendations on terms, mainly in Finnish, Swedish, English, but also sometimes in Russian, in order to harmonise the terminology used by translators and other operators in the field. They are published as files on this page.

The language specialists at the Prime Minister’s Office also contribute to specialised administrative glossaries produced by other operators or comment on their glossaries. These glossaries are published in Valto, the joint publication archive of the Government (use e.g. ‘sanasto’ as a search term), the TEPA Term Bank maintained by the Finnish Terminology Centre, and the Terminologies Tool maintained by the Digital and Population Data Services Agency

The Prime Minister’s Office also draws up a variety of guidelines, especially to support legislative drafting in Swedish and to solve problems that arise when writing text in English, compiles translation memories consisting of ministries’ texts and maintains a list of glossaries produced by operators in different sectors.