Raha oli ongelma.

English Translation

The problem was money.

Without context, there is no reason to reverse the translation. Better to use ‘Money was the problem’.

There’s no reason to reverse the translation—nor is there any reason not to reverse the translation, in this context.

BTW if anything, it’s the Finnish sentence here that should be reversed.

Word order in Finnish often makes the distinction made in English by “a” vs. “the”. For instance, M[in]ulla on pyyhe means “I have a towel”, but Pyyhe on minulla means “I have the towel” (= the only towel / a recently mentioned towel).

In the same way, Raha oli ongelma would ordinarily mean “Money is a problem”. If money is the (one and only, and/or previously mentioned) problem, then that would be better expressed by Ongelma oli raha.

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I have to clarify that when there is an almost word-for-word mapping between a sentence in two languages I am against changing it.

If we are going to discuss whether it is the English or the Finnish sentence that is correct I will say, without a shadow of a doubt, the Finnish sentence is correct by definition because that is the language I am trying to learn. To me as a user I don’t care where you got the source material and the translations from, there is no excuse for putting up sentences in bad Finnish.