Facts to go
From Europe to South America – you will find Spanish everywhere
It may come as a surprise to some people, but: Spanish is in second place on the list of most widely spoken first languages – ahead of
English (!) and behind Mandarin (
Chinese). Over 580 million people in the world speak Spanish, about 480 million of them as their first language. Spanish is the official language in more than 20 countries, including, of course, Spain, but also Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru and Chile. Another interesting fact: in the USA, Spanish is the second most common native language and is spoken by 41 million people.
You can communicate with people all over the world in Spanish – whether it’s in a private or business context. The prerequisite: you speak Spanish yourself or ideally have a
professional translation to hand. With the right form of address, you can not only make yourself understood, but really make an impact on your audience (in a business sense, your potential customers). Along with vocabulary and grammar, high-quality Spanish translations therefore also involve cultural adaptation of the translation to its intended recipients. And in this regard,
translation agencies are far ahead of (free) online translators.
The Spanish sounds different – and should also be translated differently
Anyone who has been to Spain and then spends their next holiday in South or Central America will probably realise: although the people all speak Spanish, it sounds different. You heard right! Because there really are linguistic differences. In Mexico and Colombia, for example, the “ll” is pronounced “y”, while in Argentina and Uruguay “ll” sounds like “sh”. So it comes as no surprise that there are also regional differences that require consideration in translations of Spanish texts.
In order to ensure that a Spanish translation is comprehensible to its readers, you should find an experienced and competent translator. Ideally, of course, that means native speakers who themselves live in the country of the target language and know exactly how people speak there. As a
certified translation agency, we work precisely with translation professionals of this sort. This ensures that the translated texts are grammatically perfect and stylistically correct. And if you prefer the belt-and-braces approach, we will arrange for a second native speaker to
proofread your translation.
Why Spanish can make your head spin – and translation is not (always) straightforward
Anyone who thinks they can simply apply the grammar of their native language to Spanish (or the other way around) will soon get lost in the long grass. In comparison to other languages, Spanish has a large number of grammatical peculiarities. Question and exclamation marks are one striking example. They appear not only at the end of a sentence, but upside down at the beginning of a question (¿) or exclamation (¡). The sentence structure also differs from other languages and many relationships between words are made clear by means of prepositions.
All of this has to be taken into consideration in a good translation. Especially if the translation is
medical or involves
technical documentation, there must be no careless mistakes in the text. Consulting a translation professions is therefore always advisable.
