ITALIAN TRANSLATION

Some 60 to 70 million people consider Italian as their mother language. The figure goes up to 110 to 120 million for people who use Italian as a cultural or second language. Apart from being the official language of Italy, it is also counted among the official languages of Switzerland.  All this automatically increases the global importance of the Italian language. Consequently Italian language translation professionals have a lot to look forward to in terms of job opportunities.

Though the degree of accuracy required depends upon the nature of the individual projects, we will assume that the readers of this article would like to take up Italian language translation as a career. Clients that opt for professional language translators, usually do so because they have important documents to translate. So they would expect a high quality translation. So if you are interested in making a career in English to Italian translation or any other language pair involving Italian, you should not only learn the language well, but also have an idea about its intricacies. The following information about the Italian language would help you in your way to becoming a better Italian language translator.

• Italian language belongs to the category of Romance languages. This branch of languages is a part of the Indo-European language family that comprise of all languages that descended from Latin which was the language of ancient Rome. Italian is closer to the two Italo-Dalmatian languages which are Sicilian and the now extinct Dalmatian. These three languages are a part of the Italo-Western grouping of Romance languages.

• Unlike the majority of Romance languages, Italian still maintains the contrast between short and long consonants as they existed in Latin. Moreover among the various Romance languages, it is Italian which is considered closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary.

• Italian script uses the Latin alphabet. There are 21 letters in the Italian alphabet. And as an Italian language translator you should be aware that the alpha bet does not contain letters like J, K, W, X and Y. However, these letters might appear in words that have been loaned from other languages like in jeans, taxi and whisky. However, use of these letters is not encouraged in contemporary Italian.

• There are a number of distinctive dialects derived from Italian. This is because each city had been until recently considered as city-states. Over time Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used widely across the nation so as a logical extension, characteristics of local speech were adopted and resulted in different versions of Regional Italian.

Translators working on English to Italian translations would produce better quality articles if they conduct an in-depth study of various Italian dialects.