06.02.2009 Unusual language combinations

It should come as no surprise that Overtaal receives more orders for translations from Dutch into English (and vice versa) than for any other language combination. While nearly 80% of the assignments we receive are translated either from or into English, translations from or into German and French are also fairly commonplace. Every now and then, however, our clients surprise us with requests for translations into languages that are truly unusual – at least in Western Europe.

For instance, one of our regular clients wanted a technical document of over 15,000 words translated from English into Hindi. We asked one of our partner agencies in Asia to carry out the translation, enabling us to deliver a finished product to the customer. This customer then asked if we could translate the same document into Malayalam. Like Hindi, Malayalam is one of the official languages of India. With more than 35 million speakers, Malayalam can hardly be considered obscure. We found the right translator for this job, too, and have since delivered the translation to our customer.

Overtaal has also completed translations into Luxembourgish and Catalan, which may be less exotic, but are still far from ordinary. Translations into Thai and Kinyarwanda were among the other ‘unusual’ requests received of late. These translations were also completed without a problem. In fact, we have such an extensive network of translators and partner agencies at our disposal that we can almost always honour our customers’ requests and deliver excellent translations within a short period of time, whether the target language is Swahili, Aramaic, Farsi or any other ‘exotic’ language.