Allowing socks or forbidding shoes?

This sign was posted on a specific part of a childrens' play area in a local library (in Espoo, Finland). It's a place for some small-scale climbing and jumping, and apparently one should not wear shoes in there. (Presumably to avoid hurt fingers and toes.)

What I find interesting here is the difference of how this is expressed in various languages. Finland is a bilingual country with around 5-6% of the people speaking Swedish as their native tongue, though with very large locational variance. (Note that the Finnish text is first on the list and emboldened to emphasize the (locally) dominant language.) Both the Finnish and Swedish texts here simply state "Sock area", whereas the English version is politely requesting that no shoes should be worn. (With italicized text for some reason.) So there are clear differences on what is targeted (shoes vs socks) and how they are targeted (requested vs denied).

I feel that there is also a difference in the "activity" of the content. Indeed, the first two versions simply state that "you should know that this happens to be an area where socks are to be worn", whereas the latter has a more active voice in telling the viewer what to do. Is this simply a linguistical preference of doing things, or has the sign maker had the feeling that people who do not speak Finnish or Swedish require more active guidance in shoe-related behavior? This would not be an unreasonable assumption, as e.g. taking off your shoes when entering someone's home is not a universal custom, though not unique to the nordics. But it does create different messages for different groups. I do recall once talking to another family near the play area who were from the middle-east, who were barefeet at that particular area just as the sign asked, but possibly not as the sign poster intended?

Perhaps this is a linguistic artefact and it simply felt natural for the sign poster to use these turns of a phrase. Could we homogenize the message styles linguistically?

Having the Finnish and Swedish version replaced with a literal translation of "No shoes, please", i.e. "Ei kenkiä, kiitos" and "Inga skor, tack" would sound quite natural to me, if slightly terse. Especially when noting that the sign aims to dictate what people are allowed to wear, I feel that a more polite version might be in order¹. Something like "Riisuthan kenkäsi, kiitos" which uses the Finnish polite conditional structure whose meaning roughly translates to "You'll surely be taking off your shoes, won't you?" For the Swedish part I am less confident as I am not a native speaker, so I asked a few friends and colleagues for their thoughts. The consensus seemed to be, that:

• "Inga skor, tack" would be okay, but a bit "hard". A more typical way of phrasing such a request is apparently "Ta vänligen av dina skor", meaning something closer to "Kindly take off your shoes".
• Rather than "SOCKOMRÅDE", it would be better to use "STRUMPOMRÅDE", as using "sock" for sock in Swedish is an anglicism.
• Neither "SOCKOMRÅDE", "STRUMPOMRÅDE", nor "SUKKA-ALUE" were found something that people found natural, either in Swedish nor Finnish.

In the other direction, to my ears replacing the English part with "Sock area" would sound okay, if maybe slightly clunky. Here I also consulted native (American English) speakers said that it didn't sound like something that a native speaker² would write. Furthermore, from my perspective, "Sock area" would also be missing the magic word "Please" which is ever so crucial in English politeness.

To make this more interesting, here is an image³ of a similar sign from Loviisa⁴ that I came across in a blog.

So what we have here is the same core message, but the message styles have been flipped! The messages, again in the order of Finnish, Swedish and English state: "[Come] inside without shoes, please!", "Entrance without shoes, please." and "Socks, please." There is a subtle difference, besides the use of an exclamation point or a period, in the Finnish and Swedish versions, with the Finnish version using the adverb "sisään" ("[to] inside") while the Swedish version uses the noun of "inträde" ("the act of entry") as the starting word, but I am not a linguist enough to analyze that deeper.

The "Socks, please." is then in a striking contrast. Not only as again targeting a different end of the sock-shoe spectrum, but in the level of terseness! The main content of the blog post where I came across this was about visiting a Loviisa Historic House -event, and this picture was simply one of many. And yet the comment section had a lot of discussion on the English part of this sign in particular. Despite the "please" at the end, people commented that it seemed borderline impolite in its terseness, and wondered if all tourists would even understand the meaning correctly?

I'm still on the fence on whether this whole post is yet another example of me overthinking signs created by an intern in a hurry. But I do note that while the first signs looks like it was made with Word and printed in 5 minutes, the latter one looks a lot fancier. It of course might just mean that a stressed intern was given a fancy template, but I feel like there is a higher chance of more professionality also in the content of the second sign.

With a dataset of two signs it is hard to draw strong conclusions, but I find it very much worthy of note that in both signs there was a clear split between English and the Finnish/Swedish languages on what "route" was used to convey the message. I have no strong hypotheses at the moment, but if I had to guess I would conjecture that people hesitant in their command of the English language would err in the side of caution and produce overtly short text. This is slightly supported by the observation that the latter sign, located in a much more strongly Swedish-speaking area, used a better Swedish expression compared to the first sign found in the much more Finnish-dominant area of Espoo.