Latvian – did you know?
Along with Lithuanian, Latvian belongs to the Baltic group of languages. They are directly related and furthermore belong to the Indo-European language family. Latvian is spoken by 2.2 million people. With a multitude of inflections, Latvian, like Lithuanian, is very similar to Greek and Latin. Although in Latvian translation there is no article. There are also many loan words in Latvian, from Russian, Swedish, German and more recently from English. Just like German, Latvian has six tenses: Present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, future I and future II. Verbs are conjugated in line with these.
When Latvia joined the EU, the large number of legal texts to be translated showed up gaps in the Latvian vocabulary. Consequently a state translation office now develops and checks neologisms. Latvian is the only Indo-European language in which stress is always on the first syllable. An interesting fact: every Latvian man’s name ends in “s“, “is“ or “us“ (Ivars, Mikus, Jānis) and every female name ends with “a“ or “e“ (Ilze, Inga).
Why choose us for translations into Latvian?
- Our Latvian translators all have at least five years’ professional experience in the translation industry and also go through our strict selection procedures. They are qualified linguists and translate exclusively into their mother tongue.
- The Translation People uses Translation Memory software in order to reduce delivery times and the cost of your Latvian translation.
- We can deliver your translations in any format, including Microsoft Office, Quark XPress, Adobe PDF, Illustrator, FrameMaker, HTML, XML, PageMaker and InDesign. Please contact us should you require a different format.
