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TECHNICAL TRANSLATION SERVICE FOR CZECH

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CZECH: BOHEMIAN LANGUAGE

The official language of the Czech Republic is spoken by close to 9.5 million people in communities of Slovakia, Austria, United States, Canada, amongst others. Derived from a Slavic tribe that dwelt in Central Bohemia, the language uses the Latin alphabet, diacritical signs and had their first records in the 13th century.

Divided between the plain landscapes of lakes, dense forests and the region of Bohemia, characterized by arid mountains, the Czech Republic was a regional power marked by religious conflicts, such as the Hussite Wars of the 15th century and the Thirty-Year War, from the 17th century.

The region's trait of conflicts extended up to the 20th century, when Germans invaded the country in World War II and in 1968, when Russians dominated the region.
It was only in 1989 when Czech, until thus united with Slovakia, pacifically recovered its freedom and became independent in 1993.
Akin to the country's mountain ranges, the Czech language is virtually impenetrable in its peculiarities.
The first writing in the language appeared in loose words and inserts in Latin texts of the 10th century, but the main features of Czech date from the 13th century, and are based in the linguistic variant of Prague.
The normative language, however, was only encoded by the Bohemian philologist and historian Josef Dobrovsky in the 19th century—reason why there is some tension between the modern literary language and spoken Czech, heavily influenced by regional dialects. Although using the Latin alphabet, Czech is very complex, since, much alike other Slavic languages, it also incorporated diacritical signs. There are, however, other peculiarities that render document translation works for Czech a true challenge. Some words, for instance, use the letters r, m and l in the role of vowels: reason why expressions such as zmrzl (frozen) are practically unpronounceable for Portuguese speakers. Czech also uses the elongation of vowels to modify the meaning of the words.

Furthermore, the tonic accent always falls on the first syllable, regardless of the length of the word.
There are also other aspects to be taken into account when translating documents from Czech to Portuguese.
In the Czech language, the aspect of the predicate is altered by prefixation, while in Portuguese, that occurs by means of auxiliary verbs. The structure of Slavic suffixes is also quite complex and more complicated than Portuguese. All Tasks, specialized in the translation of large-scale technical documentations, technical standards and technical manuals, maintains a highly qualified team to meet great demands of translation works into Czech.