German translation
Language world offers translations from German into English and from English into German. Our professional German translators work in many kinds of texts and subjects, such as medical, business, legal, automation and many others.
We translate in two steps: the first of them being the translation of the text into or from German and the second of them the checking of the writing.
While translating, the German native, professional, translator works only into his own mother tongue and always the kind of texts in which he has a high expertise. Thanks to translation technologies, such as translation memories, lexica management tools and many others, used in the German translation work, we can guarantee the best product.
The proofreading and checking step will ensure a total fluency and best linguistic perfection of the finished German work. Language world always checks and proofreads all translation works from and into the German language by a native translator.
We take care of anything around the publishing of writings and texts and can provide you with desktop publishing services for your German translations.
Should you need an German translator, please, contact us, we will try everything to supply you with a good done work.
Information about German
History of the German language
The history of the German language begins during the Migration period, with the High German consonant shift, separating South Germanic dialects from common West Germanic. Scattered Elder Futhark inscriptions are the earliest testimonies of Old High German, especially in Alemannic, from the 6th century. The earliest glosses date to the 8th and the oldest coherent texts to the 9th century. Old Saxon at this time belongs to the North Sea Germanic cultural sphere, and Low Saxon should fall under German rather than Anglo-Frisian influence during the Holy Roman Empire.
Germany was divided into many different states, therefore, the only force working for a unification or standardization of German during several hundred years was the general preference of writers trying to write in a way that could be understood in the largest possible area.
When translating the Bible (the New Testament in 1522 and the Old Testament, published in parts and completed in 1534) Martin Luther King based his translation principally on this German language, which was the most widely understood language at this time. This German language was based on Eastern Upper and Eastern Central German dialects and preserved much of the grammatical system of Middle High German. In the beginning, copies of the Bible had a long list for each region, which translated words unknown in the region into the regional dialect. In the beginning, Roman Catholics rejected Luther's translation and tried to create their own Catholic standard — which, nevertheless, only differed from 'Protestant German' in some minor details. In the middle of the 18th century a standard was created and widely accepted, thus ending the period of Early New High German.
In the Habsburg Empire, German used to be the language of commerce and government, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century German was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. It indicated that the speaker was a merchant, an urbanite, not their nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were step by step Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain. Others, such as Bratislava, were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. A few cities such as Milan remained in the beginning non-German. However, most cities were principally German during this time, such as Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, though they were surrounded by territory that other languages were spoken.
Standard German was almost only a written language until about 1800. At this time, people in urban northern Germany, who were able to speak dialects very different from Standard German, learnt it almost like a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible. The Northern German pronunciation was considered to be the standard by prescriptive pronunciation guides. Nevertheless, the actual pronunciation of standard German is not the same in every region.
Media and written works are almost all created in standard German (called Hochdeutsch in German) which is understood in all areas where the German language is spoken, excluding pre-school children in areas which speak only dialect, for example Switzerland and Austria. Nevertheless, in this age of television, even they now usually learn to understand Standard German before school time.
The first dictionary that was made by Brothers Grimm, the 16 parts of which were produced between 1852 and 1860, remains the most comprehensive guide to the words of the German language. The Duden Handbook, issued in 1860, was the first in publishing grammatical and orthographic rules. This was declared the standard definition of the German language in 1901. There were not official revisions of these rules until 1998, when governmental representatives of all German-speaking countries officially promulgated the German spelling reform of 1996. Since the reform, German spelling has been in an eight-year period, in which the reformed spelling is taught in most schools and traditional and reformed spellings co-exist in the media. There is a public debate concerning the reform with some major newspapers and magazines and several known writers refusing to adopt it.
The spelling reform of 1996 led to a public debate. Some state parliaments (Bundesländer) would not accept it (North Rhine Westphalia and Bavaria). The highest court made a short issue of it, claiming that the states had to decide for themselves. A major yet incomplete revision was installed in 2006, just in time for the new school year of 2006. In 2007, some venerable spellings will be finally invalidated. The real question is whether a language is part of the culture which must be preserved or a means of communicating information which has to allow for growth. (The reformers seemed to be unimpressed by the fact that a considerable part of that culture - namely the entire German literature of the 20th century - is in the old spelling.) But the German language has no monopoly on this fundamental dilemma.
Classification of the German language
German is a member of the Germanic family of languages, western branch, which is also part of the Indo-European language family.
Official status
Standard German language is the only official one in Liechtenstein and Austria; it shares official status in Germany along with Danish, Frisian and Sorbian as minority languages, Switzerland along with French, Italian and Romansh, Belgium along with Dutch and French and, finally, Luxembourg along with French and Luxembourgish. German is used as a local official language in German-speaking regions of Denmark, Italy, and Poland. The German language is one of the 23 official languages of the European Union.
Decline of the German language
According to varios German academics, not necessarily from an entirely negative perspective, German is a language in decline in its native country because of the increasing use of English in Germany's higher education system, as well as in business and in popular culture. For example, in 2005, Ursula Kimpel, of the University of Tübingen, said “German universities are offering more courses in English because of the large number of students coming from abroad. German is unfortunately a language in decline. We need and want our professors to be able to teach effectively in English.”