German to Dutch
In German the verb always stands at the end of the sentence. Sometimes this can be difficult.
English to Indonesian
The biggest problem is bahasa Indonesia has no tenses. We don’t know past tense or future tense. All we know is present tense and to make it past or future we simply add the time signal such as “yesterday” or “tomorrow”, etc. This shouldn’t be a problem when we do EN>ID translation, but a HUGE problem for ID>EN.
Another problem will be the vocabulary limitation. Bahasa Indonesia doesn’t have as much vocabulary as English. Therefore several English words can be translated to one Indonesian word. Here are some examples:
The food is not delicious = Makanan itu tidak enak
I’m sick = saya tidak enak badan
I smell a rat = perasaan saya tidak enak
I’m a bit reluctant to send that present = saya merasa tidak enak mengirimkan hadiah itu
totally different contexts but all are translated to “tidak enak”. This is also the concern of foreigners who learn to speak bahasa here.
Next is the articles to show quantity. English shows quantity by adding the article “a/an” or the letter “s”. In bahasa, we simply repeat the word to make it plural.
books (more than 1) = buku-buku
Students = “siswa-siswi” or “para siswa”
This becomes strange if we put it in a sentence:
Dogs are animals = anjing-anjing adalah binatang-binatang ——> this sentence is not fluent or “strange”. Therefore we omit the plural form and make it singular:
Dogs are animals = anjing adalah binatang
Turkish to English
The sentence structure in Turkish is reversed compared to English. This also holds true for all Turkic Languages and some Asian Languages. When the sentence structure of a translation is not translated correctly, the sentence in either English or Turkish can sound strange or missing words. I always start by flipping the sentence first in my mind then I begin a translation.
Another difficult aspect is the agglutive nature of the language, where all the tenses etc. are at the end of the word. It makes for long words in Turkish.
Finnish to English
What makes Finnish a bit hard for the English native speaker – apart from the complicated grammar, the numerous inflexions, the alien lexis, the lack of articles, and the lack of a future tense – is that there is no gender whatsoever (e.g. no separate words for ‘he’ and ’she’), and this, together with the fact that utterances are often impersonalised, means that it is sometimes awfully problematic working out who is doing what to whom, and what sex they are (often necessary to know in English).
Check out our Finnish Translation Services website
English to Japanese
I studied Japanese for a couple of years and it is also interesting in that way. What a great language, verbs at the end, and different numbering systems. Like we count in thousandths (1,000) but they count with four zeros (1,0000). What a task to translate this language! The counters are also interesting – a flat item is described in a different way to a round item – and there are several different ‘counters’.
Check out our Japanese Translation Services website.
English to Hindi
I don’t translate Hindi/Gujarati, but I live with some native speakers, and they always refer to numbers in lakh (100,000) and crore (10,000,000), and I’m constantly doing mental calculations (and then dividing by 50 for rupees, too!). Different numbering systems take some getting used to.
These tips are brought to you by Translation Services UK who also offer a free translation service on their website. Remember, if you are going to get your document(s) translated then printed please make sure you use people and NOT software.