Italian Language Translation
A direct descendent of the Latin spoken by ancient Romans, Italian is a language of travel, traditions and taste. Whether you are reading Dante’s Divine Comedy or enjoying a Puccini (or Mozart) opera, Italian has proven itself to be the language of a cultured people with a proud history. Some other interesting facts about Italian include:
- It is very similar to other Romance languages. Lexically, it is 89% similar to French and 82% similar to Spanish.
- Italian is considered to be the closest living language to Latin, but with simplified grammar.
- It is the one language used universally for writing music.
- There are many regional dialects in Italy. The dialect of Florence is the basis for Standard Italian.
There are about 66 million native Italian speakers around the world and twice as many who speak it as a second language. Although Italian is considered a relatively easy language to learn, it has some potential pitfalls for would-be translators. If you are able to do something, is it something you potere or riuscire? If you are heading to a restaurant, are you going “a” or “da”? Does the preposition ‘between’ translate as tra or fra, and is there any difference? And asking for a camera may get you puzzled looks anywhere but a hotel because you are actually requesting a ‘room!’
Italian Language Characteristics
With its Latin roots, Italian is a Romance language like French and Spanish. So what are some of the unique traits that that set Italian apart?
- The standard contemporary Italian alphabet has only 21 letters. The letters J, K, W, X, and Y appear rarely and then usually in loanwords (such as taxi, whisky, or jeans).
- Nearly all Italian words end in a vowel.
- Italian is completely phonetic; every letter corresponds to a specific, distinguishable pronounced sound.
- Politeness and deference is expressed by using the formal word lei for “you,” instead of the informal tu.
- When addressing someone formally in writing, certain pronouns are capitalized in the middle of the sentence as a show of respect.
- Vowels can feature diacritic marks: à, è, ì, ò, and ù.
Italian Market
Italy possesses a large developed economy with plenty of business opportunities. Here are some facts to consider:
- With a GDP of 2.4 trillion dollars in 2008, Italy boasts the world’s tenth largest economy.
- Italy is the world’s sixth largest exporter, specializing in engineering products, textiles and clothing, motor vehicles, chemicals and food.
- Over 40 million international tourists visited Italy in 2007, making it the fifth most visited country.
Italian Translation Text Expansion
Generally, documents translated from English into Italian require about 15% more words, although the difference can be minor with technical texts. This is due to the linguistic features of the language. Oftentimes, more words are necessary to say the same thing in Italian.
Text expansion can create difficulties in document formatting and desktop publishing (DTP) . It may result in a document that is crowded and hard-to-read as more words are forced to fit into the same design. Any documents intended for translation into Italian should include enough text space to accommodate expansion. Website translation can also be facilitated by a design that allows for flexibility in dealing with text expansion.
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