English Translation
A lot of kids wear them.
We don’t know the context but by default, doesn’t ‘käyttää’ mean ‘use’ rather than ‘wear’?
The sentence was translated from English by Silja, the Tatoeba Finnish corpus maintainer, so I’ll take her word for it.
Okay. I have just asked one of my Finnish teachers on Italki how she would translate ‘käyttävät’ in the above sentence, given no context or prior information. And she went for ‘use’. So there is room for interpretation.
Yes, when going from Finnish to English, without context, use is the expected translation. However, when translating the other way around, I have no objection to seeing käyttää, as it seems to be quite commonly used to translate wear, judging from a simple corpus search.
Maybe you could ask your teacher what word she would use in Finnish?
Well, even with my mediocre Finnish I agree that you should ‘käyttää’ for ‘wear’.
I don’t think there is a simple practical solution to the problem with synonyms. If the sentences are random, and there are enough of them, then you would expect all the different meanings of a particular word to be represented. However, if the word is used in only two or three sentences then the representation might be misleading statistically. That is just the way it is.
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