Professional Italian Translation Services
Halifax provides professional Italian translation services.
Translation and editing, certified Italian translation, Italian interpreter, simultaneous or consecutive – Halifax provides all language services. We translate into Italian and we translate Italian to English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Albanian and many other languages.
Italian language services
We offer a comprehensive set of language services including:
- Italian document translation
- Certified professional Italian translation
- Revision, editing or proofreading of Italian documents
- Italian document conversion
- Italian interpreting
- Video translation & transcription from and to Italian
- Desktop publishing (DTP)
Our rates are among the lowest you will find for a reliable professional Italian translation service. See our prices page for details.
Italian translation – our translator’s viewpoint
We asked one of our best professional Italian translators to tell us something about her language. She studied it at university and has worked with it professionally for 16 years. Here is what she told us.
What special challenges do you face when you translate or interpret Italian?
I work with Italian translation every day. I think Italian is a relatively straightforward language compared with some, but what can cause problems for translators in professional texts is simply vocabulary. Many texts require a good knowledge of terms in different fields, and the great challenge is to translate them correctly into English and other languages, especially when those languages have absorbed a lot of Latin themselves, but developed it in rather different ways.
Of course, for an adequate translation it is necessary for the translator to be well acquainted with the material he is translating and to have the support of a professional associate who helps him when translating terms, but the basic prerequisite for a quality translation of terms is the existence of an appropriate terminological dictionary. The lack of Italian-Serbian dictionaries is the biggest obstacle for translating professional texts.
And where did Italian come from?
Italian evolved from spoken Latin (vulgar Latin) mixed with the languages of various invaders after the fall of Rome.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, a process of linguistic standardization began, based on the language spoken in Tuscany, thanks primarily to the works of three great authors: Dante Aligijeri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Bocaccio.
In the sixteenth century, this model was adopted by writers and scholars, while in the seventeenth century the number of readers increased, thanks, inter alia, to the scientific prose of Galileo Galilei whose vocabulary was clear and elegant.
The divide between the written language and the patchwork of spoken dialects was eased in the 19th century by the publication of the novel The Betrothed, in which Alesandro Manconi again purified and simplified the literary language, molding it towards the contemporary Florentine.
Linguistic unity was achieved in the twentieth century under the influence of several factors, above all radio and television. As a result, a language has been created that all Italians understand, although in written and oral expression it differs according to the education of the person using it, from rich and expressive to simple and repetitive.
Nowadays, Italian is spoken by about 63 million people, most of whom live in the Apennine Peninsula. It is the official language in Italy, San Marino and some Swiss cantons, and a second language in parts of Slovenia and Croatia. It is also understandable in Malta, where it was the official language until 1934, when it was replaced by English.
What else can you tell us about the Italian language?
One of the characteristics of written Italian is that it is a conservative language and that phonetic pronunciation and writing do not differ much. When spoken, it is a language with melodic sequences that are unique in the world, a form of song, which makes it easy to recognize an Italian speaker among others.
Italy
Italy is a varied country spanning from Switzerland almost to Africa (the Italian island of Lampedusa is ony about 140k from the Tunisian coast). If you are unfamiliar with Italy but would like to know more about it, try reading Alex Waltner’s Swedish Nomad blog, there are a lot of interesting snippets about the country.
