Nowadays many people think translating is an easy job. They decide to delve into translation projects relying on their high school foreign language classes or, even worse, machine translation, which is great for certain cases but lacks the accuracy for high-quality translations. But translating is far more than just turning a word into its equivalent in another language. Translation is transferring thoughts, feelings and even cultural peculiarities from one language to another.
Tools like Google Translate come in handy when you need a few solitary words translated, but as soon as you enter a full sentence, anyone with basic knowledge of a foreign language can find a mistake in the translated text. This is because different languages come with different components and grammar rules.
1. Bosnian language is highly inflected.
Unlike some languages that are weakly inflected — including English — Bosnian language is highly inflected, with a large number of different grammatical forms for a single word. To better explain this, we can say that the English adjective “black” has only one grammatical form besides its comparative and superlative forms, as opposed to its 30 forms in Bosnian. A word changes depending on its gender, number and case. A good Bosnian translation service is skilled in avoiding mistakes that can occur due to these differences.
2. Bosnia has three official languages.
Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian are the three official languages spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the primary language is Bosnian, and the three languages are similar so speakers have no difficulties understanding each other, a good translator is familiar with the differences between the three and can deliver the desired language pair to the client.
3. It can be difficult to translate Turkish words.
Bosnia was under the Ottoman Empire for more than 500 years, and many Turkish words have stuck around. Elements of the Ottoman cultural heritage are an essential part of the Bosnian identity. Some of the most famous Bosnian writers have used Turkish words extensively in their novels, including Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric and Mesa Selimovic.
These words can be hard to understand if you didn’t grow up in the Balkans, so they’re difficult to translate for someone who isn’t native to this area, let alone a machine. Experienced Bosnian translation services have mastered Turkish expressions in the Bosnian language and have no difficulty translating them into various languages.
Demanding translation tasks should be left to the experts
Even if a person is an educated general translator, there’s a chance they’ll end up with a text from a domain they know nothing about, so they’ll waste a lot of time familiarizing themselves with the given topic to find proper locutions to cover the translation.
To avoid mistakes in your translation, it’s always a good idea to hire a professional Bosnian translation service that will provide a translator specialized in the subject matter of your document. We have experts in all fields, from legal to literary translation!