The Czech language

The Czech language is spoken by some 10 million people in the Czech Republic and by an additional 2 million people of Czech origin (such as myself) in other countries. Czech is one of the Western Slavic languages; it is rather close to Slovak and – to a lesser degree – to Polish. The Czech alphabet is a modified version of the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the religious reformer Jan Hus in the 15th century. This “abeceda” features diacritics (characters with acutes and carons), the most infamous of which is Ř, a rolling palatalized “RSH” which non-native speakers of Czech often find virtually unpronounceable. Generally, Czech is said to be one of the most difficult languages to learn, due to its complex grammar, highly morphological structure, many irregular inflections and a rather free word order which is used to produce epmhasis and stylistic variations. Also, some words appear to lack vowels, such as “Čtvrtek” (“Thursday” – roughly pronounced “ch-t-v-r-teck”).

Even though I am a native speaker of Czech, I consider German to be my first language, since I received most of my higher and further education in German and have lived in a German-speaking country since 1982. Therefore I cooperate with fellow translators and other professionals based in the Czech Republic whenever my clients request translations into Czech.

If you require an accurate and affordable translation from or into Czech, simply send in a copy or a link and ask for a free quote. Meanwhile, the following three resources may be of use to you if you wish to translate single words or do some terminology research: