Hungarian: Specialist translation & interpreting

Hungarian, which is also called Magyar, is the official language of Hungary, three Serbian municipalities, the Slovenian Prekmurje region as well as one of several official languages in the Serbian Vojvodina region. It is also an official language of the European Union and a recognized minority language in Croatia, Austria, Romania and Slovakia. There are approximately 13 million Hungarian native speakers, 9.8 million of whom live in Hungary.

Hungarian is part of the Uralic family of languages and belongs to the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. This makes it one of few European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European group of languages and also the non-Indo-European language most frequently used in Europe. It is related to Mansi and Khanty languages which are spoken in Western Siberia. Only Finnish and Estonian belong to the same language group as Hungarian; however, since they were divided in the early stages and have evolved very differently, the traces of their common heritage are only apparent in certain phonological similarities.

Speakers of Hungarian dialects are, for the most part, able to understand each other without difficulty as the dialects are different only in phonetics and vocabulary. The only exception is the Moldavian dialect, which, due to its isolation, has kept archaic linguistic features and includes many Romanian words.

Smooth communication is a top priority, especially when dealing with authorities or other important appointments, and this depends to a large extent on the interpreter. In order to avoid unnecessary problems and misunderstandings, we at AP Fachübersetzungen work exclusively with competent Hungarian translators and interpreters who have many years of experience and impeccable references. Our strict quality management sets high standards and guarantees the impeccable quality of our services. At AP Fachübersetzungen, your translation and interpreting projects are always in the best of hands. Whether you need a consecutive, simultaneous, telephone, whisper, trade fair, liaison or conference interpreter or a specialist translator - you can always rely on our interpreting and translation agency in Nuremberg.

The history of the Hungarian Language can be traced back to the 10^th - 11^th century BC, when the tribes of the Urals changed their way of life as hunters and gatherers to became nomadic shepherds. Between the 5^th and 9^th century, Hungarian experienced an influx of Turkish vocabulary that focused on agriculture, government and family. The migration of the Hungarian tribes to the Carpathian Basin was completed in the 9^th century, and thus began a new period of continual interaction with Slavic languages, however, mostly on the vocabulary level.

In the year 1000, the Hungarian king Stephen I converted to Christianity and adopted the Latin alphabet, which not only meant a political and cultural alliance with Western Europe, but also the introduction of new customs and institutions. Therefore, the oldest surviving written texts in Hungarian are religious in nature.

The expansion of the Ottoman Empire reached Hungary in the 16^th century and marked the beginning of a military occupation lasting 150 years, during which Hungary was divided into three parts: the north-western region ruled by Austria; the central region occupied by the Turks and the independent Principality of Transylvania (now located in Romania). From a linguistic point of view, this period is characterized by a second wave of Turkish loan words, and by the increasing influence of German on the Hungarian language.

After the recapture of Budapest by the Habsburg army, Hungary became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which the cultural and scientific life was marked by German and Latin. With the onset of the Enlightenment in the 18^th century, the Hungarian intellectual elite, led by Ferenc Kazinczy, initiated a fundamental language reform to make Hungarian more widely used for academic and literary purposes. About 10,000 new words were invented, several thousand of which are still widely used. Further standardization and unification of the Hungarian language has made many dialectical differences disappear.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed after World War I and lost two-thirds of its territory. In the course of the 20^th century, the influence of the German language gradually decreased and was temporarily replaced by Russian language influences.

The Hungarian alphabet can contain either 40 or even 44 letters, depending on how it is counted. This is due to the fact that, unlike in German, umlauts such as Ö and Ü or Ő and Ű and digraphs such as dz and sz are counted as separate letters and that some letters occur only in foreign words or names and are therefore not part of the Hungarian alphabet, strictly speaking. A distinction is therefore made between the large and the small Hungarian alphabet. In Hungarian each letter corresponds to a sound, in English and German, however, there can be several sounds for one letter.

Hungarian is an agglutinative language. This means that words are not inflected, but word forms are formed by adding suffixes. For example, there are no possessive pronouns and prepositions in the Hungarian language. Relationships of possession, direction, or temporality are instead formed by agglutination. Several suffixes can be added to a noun, but their order follows fixed rules. Furthermore, Hungarian, unlike German and many other European languages, does not use gender and uses articles comparatively seldom, although they do exist.

German only has four cases, whereas 18 cases have to be distinguished in Hungarian. Only three of these cases have German equivalents, a circumstance that sometimes presents the Hungarian translator with challenges, because despite the absence of grammatical forms, no nuances of meaning must be lost in the translation, of course.

Due to the common history with Austria, there are many German loan words in the Hungarian language. Conversely, the German language contains fewer loan words from Hungarian.

Due to the particularities of the Hungarian language, it is advisable to entrust the translation of your texts or interpretation to a native speaker or very experienced language expert. Therefore, at AP Fachübersetzungen we work exclusively with certified and experienced Hungarian translators and interpreters and can thus guarantee the high quality and accuracy of your Hungarian specialist translation. Our interpreting and translation agency exclusively entrusts certified, publicly appointed and sworn translators with certified translations for Hungarian.