Oaxaca is a special state in Mexico: hugging Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, Oaxaca is famous for its high indigenous population, with an estimated one-third of the state speaking an indigenous language (roughly 50% of whom do not speak Spanish). Oaxaca alone accounts for more than half of all indigenous language speakers in Mexico, with the territory’s rugged terrain primarily to thank for the region retaining its original cultures and languages. The western portion of Oaxaca is home to the Mixtec group of languages, including Estetla Mixtec—our newest translation offering.
Estetla Mixtec is the native language of around 13,000 people in Oaxaca, with 530,000 or so people in total across the La Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Pueblo speaking one of the 50-odd languages classified in the Mixtec macrolanguage. Many Estetla Mixtec speakers (and speakers of other Mixtec languages) also speak Spanish, the lingua franca of Mexico, and the prestige of Spanish acts as a threat to Estetla Mixtec. Translation companies rarely accommodate the Mixtec languages, and when they do, it’s typically just “Mixtec” as a group, not specific varieties like Estetla Mixtec. But here at TranslationServices.com, we’re proud to announce that we’ve just launched an Estetla Mixtec translation team.
Our Estetla Mixtec translation rates are readily available upon request of a free quote!
Diving a bit deeper into Estetla Mixtec
Estetla Mixtec speakers call the western region of Oaxaca, specifically the cultural region known as La Mixteca, home. They share the region with speakers of the few dozen other Mixtec languages, some of which are relatively mutually intelligible and some of which feel entirely foreign. The most similar varieties to Estetla are (Santa María) Peñoles, (San Antonio) Huitepec, (Santiago) Tlazoyaltepec, and (San Juan) Tamazola, which exhibit 75% mutual intelligibility—quite similar, but also quite different. Collectively, the Mixtec languages belong to the Oto–Manguean language family, a major language family in southern Mexico that also includes Zapotec, Otomi, Chinantec, and more.
Grammatically, Estetla Mixtec and its cousins are complex and nothing like English or Spanish. The basic word order is verb-subject-object, conforming to the verb-initial structure typical of Mesoamerican languages. Estetla Mixtec places nouns before adjectives, like Spanish, but unlike Spanish, it attaches suffixes to nouns to show possession and marks verbal tense through prefixes. Estetla Mixtec also uses suffixes in place of words like “this” or “that.” It’s a tricky language packed with nuance that can be hard to translate, which is why the expertise of trained native speakers is so important.
Let our Estetla Mixtec team provide high-quality translations for all types of projects.
While most translation firms overlook minority languages like Estetla Mixtec, we at TranslationServices.com take our dedication to this linguistic variety seriously. We’ve hired our Estetla Mixtec translators from different parts of La Mixteca and elsewhere in Oaxaca and Mexico, ensuring that we hire native speakers of different dialects of the language. We’ve recruited passionate translators who love their native language and are eager to help clients translate both to and from Estetla Mixtec—for projects of any type.
Our Estetla Mixtec translation team is necessarily small, since there just aren’t a lot of Estetla Mixtec speakers in the world. But if you have niche requirements—for example, academic translation services, business translation services, literary services, or localization services—don’t hesitate to talk to us. We’ve made our team as diverse and robust as possible, so if you need a translator who specializes in a particular domain of translation or has expertise in a specific field, let us know, and we’ll do our best to accommodate your requests.
Ready to see what our Estetla Mixtec translators can do for you? Shoot us a message whenever you’re ready to place an order, and let’s get started!