Knowledge to go
A Unique Language – What's Exceptional About Hungarian
The Hungarian language is one of the most difficult languages in the world. Around 15 million people speak Hungarian, most of them in Hungary, with smaller communities in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria. Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family and therefore differs significantly from the languages of its neighboring countries. Hardly anyone outside Hungary understands the language – not even Finns, although Finnish comes from the same language family.
The Hungarian alphabet contains more letters than other languages. Ö, Ő, Ü, and Ű are four of these, along with the so-called digraphs (combinations of two letters representing one phoneme, syllable, or morpheme) cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, and zs, as well as the trigraph dzs. Additionally, there is a distinction between the uppercase and lowercase Hungarian alphabet: The letters Q, W, X, and Y only appear in loanwords and historical spellings (such as surnames). There is some debate about whether these should be counted, and as a result, the total number of letters is sometimes given as 44 and sometimes as 40.
While this might seem complicated to non-native speakers, it is no challenge for native translators. A professional translation by native speakers can easily handle this.
Long Words with Great Meaning – and How to Make Them Look Good in Translation
Anyone who has spent time in Hungary may have marveled at the impressively long words on signs and elsewhere. This is not due to a local preference for complexity, but because Hungarian (like Turkish) is an agglutinative language. In simple terms, this means that words get longer the more information they contain. Here's an illustrative example:
ház (house) 🠖 házam (my house) 🠖 házaim (my houses) 🠖 házaimban (in my houses)
In linguistic terms, this is no challenge for native translators. They are familiar with the nuances of the language and know how to handle them. However, it becomes more challenging when a translation must fit into a predetermined layout. Long words can become problematic in such cases. For example, in technical translations of user manuals, space is limited for the large amount of information. To ensure the Hungarian translation is as well-executed as the original, the layout of the translation must be adjusted to ensure line breaks and hyphenation are linguistically correct and the text fits the design.
The Right Address Makes a Difference – Also in Translation
Hungarian has an almost endless number of greetings and forms of address. Some are relics from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, used for (older) women, while others are used by children when addressing adults, and some serve as a way to address women who are not personally known to the speaker. Even teenagers use their own specific colloquial expressions. These nuances make a big difference in translations.
Especially in marketing translations, it's important to address the target audience as precisely as possible – in every language. Depending on the product or service, customer groups vary and speak different languages. When the translation is closely aligned with the cultural linguistic habits of the customers, the chances of a purchase or business deal increase. The same applies to any other type of Hungarian specialized translations.
