Indonesia may not seem like such a big country, but it’s the fourth-most populated one on the planet. Countless ethnolinguistic groups have made the islands that constitute modern-day Indonesia their home for millennia, resulting in one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. While most of the languages come from the Austronesian language family, there are significant differences between them. So, though most Indonesians learn Indonesian as a second language to talk with those from other parts of the country, they usually use a native indigenous language in their local community.
Toba Batak is one of these indigenous languages, used by the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra, who call their language Hata Batak. Despite the increasing incursion of Indonesian, which is used as the national lingua franca, Toba Batak remains the primary language in the region. However, since Toba Batak is a minority language in a country with more than 700 different languages, it’s not easy to find translation services for the language. That’s where TranslationServices.com comes in. We’ve just launched a Toba Batak team, and we’re proud of it.
Reach out now for a free quote for our Toba Batak translation services. All you have to do is ask!
Learning how the Toba Batak people communicate
The Toba Batak language is concentrated on Samosir Island and the areas east, south, and west of Toba Lake, located in the middle of the center of the province of North Sumatra. The language is similar to those spoken in the surrounding areas, some of which also bear the name Batak. The Batak languages even have their own writing system, the Batak script, which was used historically, although most people today just use the Latin alphabet. Like most languages in Indonesia, Toba Batak is part of the Malayo–Polynesian branch of the expansive Austronesian language family.
Toba Batak distinguishes clusivity in its first-person plural pronoun, a common feature of Austronesian languages. This means there are two words for “we”—one includes the listener, and the other one doesn’t. Toba Batak words undergo inflection for various grammatical means, with possession marked on nouns with a suffix and verbs marked for person and number. Verbs in Toba Batak can accept a wide range of prefixes, suffixes, and in circumfixes to express tense, aspect, mode, and more, opening up the language to significant nuance.
Get the Toba Batak translation services you want.
Toba Batak might sound difficult to you, but our translators are native speakers, so they understand the intricacies of the language like the backs of their hands. So experienced are our Toba Batak translators, in fact, that they can even translate old documents written in the Batak script! Of course, we can also translate modern literature, notes, or anything else a Toba Batak speaker may like to share with the outside world. On a similar note, we can help those outside of the Toba Batak community engage with locals by translating business materials, academic research questionnaires, educational material, and more. If you have English-language content like books, poems, apps, games, or websites, why not translate them into Toba Batak to reach an eager new audience and help them preserve their language by creating more content in it?
What’s your Toba Batak translation project? Get in touch now to give us all the details!