Obstacles to Farsi Translation

Obstacles to Farsi Translation

One of the most interesting points to note about Farsi is the fact that it is, at heart, an Indo-European language. While it may not initially bear much resemblance to the Romance, Germanic, or Slavic languages, they all share a common ancestor. In fact, modern Farsi contains a number of French adaptations and is also significantly influenced by the Russian language. English is also playing an increasingly important role in the development of modern Farsi, although like many other world languages ​​that come into direct and persistent contact with the English language, Farsi speakers are developing their own Farsi equivalents. potentially intrusive vocabulary.

Probably the biggest point of confusion when English speakers try to understand the connections between Farsi and other Indo-European languages ​​is the fact that Farsi does not use the Latin alphabet. Farsi uses some Cyrillic script, but generally spells its words using a modified version of the Arabic script that incorporates more letters and changes the pronunciation of many shared letters. While Farsi can be written in the Latin alphabet, most Farsi documents are written in script. Understandably, this is a major point of contention among English speakers trying to translate from English to Farsi or Farsi to English.

There are some grammatical differences between Farsi and English that also make translation from Farsi difficult. Perhaps most notable is the Farsi reliance on transitive and intransitive verbs. Quite simply, in English, the subject of a sentence is placed front and center, while in Farsi the subject of a sentence is more likely to appear attached as a pronoun connected to the verb of the sentence. The order of adverbs and adjectives is also reversed in Farsi compared to English. Another common point of contention between Farsi and the English speaker is the lack of grammatical gender within Farsi nouns. In general, the main grammatical difference between Farsi and English is that the former uses a Subject-Object-Verb word order, while the latter uses a Subject-Verb-Object word order.

While learning Farsi may not be as difficult as you think, it’s generally a smarter idea to hire a professional if you need quality Farsi translations. It is possible to gain a working understanding of the language in a short period of time, but even more than most languages, Farsi contains a great deal of subtlety and cultural inflection that goes beyond its basic grammatical structure and vocabulary. Fortunately, finding a qualified Farsi translator is much easier than finding a translator for other languages ​​with less than a hundred million speakers.

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