Translation from foreign languages

A language is a system of information coding and transfer, a special standard. The number of the languages in the modern world is from 5 to 10 thousand. Modern languages are so difficult that learning them takes a lot of effort. That is why the interlinguistic and intercultural communication is possible only with the use of services of a translator or an interpreter. The profession of a translator or an interpreter appeared in very ancient times and is still relevant to this day. The most advance systems of machine translation still are not capable of the quality comparable with the quality of work of a professional translator. On the pages of this website from this section, you can learn a lot of useful information about each of the languages with which our translation agency works.

Interesting facts about some languages of the world

• There are 13 languages in the world spoken by more than 100 million people each. These languages are Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malayo-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German and Urdu (an official language of Pakistan).
• The total number of languages in the world is almost 6,500. At the same time, more than 2,000 languages are spoken by less than 1,000 people each.
• The two books which have been translated into the greatest number of languages are The Bible and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
• According to Guinness Book of World Records, the longest palindrome word is the Finnish word saippuakivikauppias (“soap seller”).
• There are more than 20 synonymous words with a meaning “snow” in Eskimo.
• The words meaning “mother” begin with the letter M in most languages of the world.
• The word Canada translated from an Indian language means “big village”.
• The most ancient letter of the modern alphabets is O.
• The artificial language of international communication Esperanto was created by the doctor from Warsaw Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887.
• Swahili is a mixture of languages of African tribes, Arabic and Portuguese.
• In order to learn how to pronounce the difficult Russian phrase “Я люблю вас” ("I love you"), English people use the mnemonic phrase “Yellow-blue bus”.
• There was a railroad accident in 2001 in Belgium the cause of which was a language barrier. When the motorman of one of the trains went from a station in spite of the red light of the semaphore, the dispatcher called his colleague at the next station to warn him of that. However, the dispatchers could not understand each other because one of them spoke Dutch and the other spoke French. Both of these languages are state languages of Belgium.
• The sign languages used by the deaf and dumb are different in different territories, as the usual languages. Thus, different sign languages are used in the USA and Great Britain.
• There is no state language de jure in the USA, although de facto the state language there is English, of course.
• On one of the Canary Islands, where the official language is a dialect of Spanish, the natives speak not only in a usual way, but also using whistling. That communication mode has appeared because of the rocky relief of the island and absence of roads. As a result, instead of going to the neighbouring village, the local people prefer to whistle to communicate. The communication distance in this case is 5-6 km. When communicating in this “language” the local people press the tip of their tongue to their teeth and start whistling, at the same time pronouncing words in the same way as they do during a usual conversation.
• The names of Wales, the Romanian region of Walachia and the Belgian region of Wallonia have originated from one and the same German word Walh, which means “foreigner” or “alien”. Thus, the names of all those regions are translated as “land of aliens”.
• The Bougainville islanders in the Pacific ocean speak a language in the alphabet of which there are only 12 letters. The alphabet of this language has been worked out on the base of the Latin alphabet and consists of the letters A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U and V.