The term türk has its origin in the Turkic languages and can mean “human being" or “strong"—both of which are quite coherent definitions for Turkish, a language characterized by the harmony of vowels, agglutination and lack of genders, spoken by more than 70 million people around the world.

By Juliana Tavares

The official language of Turkey and the actual language of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Turkish is also one of the official languages of Bulgaria, in the district of Prizren, in Kosovo, and some municipalities in Macedonia. Originating in Central Asia, in the area of Mongolia and Siberia, with the first records dated from around 800 BC, Turkish has been disseminated to the west during the domination of the Ottoman Empire, between 1299 and 1453, when it had inflows from Arabic and Persian words. With the consolidation of the Republic of Turkey by the revolutionary Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1923, a major reform in the Turkish form of writing was carried out: foreign terms were replaced by words that alluded to the primeval Turkish culture, sometimes causing confusion mostly between the vocabulary of youth and elders.
Also, some words from ancient Turkish acquired new meanings: e.g. betik (formerly “book") is used today as “computer language". The change was one of the most important in the country's nationalist program and intended to produce a more modern, practical, accurate language, and one easier to learn as well.

Beyond the nationalization of foreign terms, Turkey replaced the Arabic alphabet—which only had three vowels, the long ā, ū, ī and many redundant consonants—, for Latin in 1928, whose sounds are the language's own.

The language is characterized by some aspects: the Turkish vowel system has groups of frontal, posterior, “rounded" vowels, and “non rounded" vowels, reason why vowel harmony of the Turkish language presents, alternatively, either only posterior vowels (a, ı, o, and u), or only frontal vowels (e, i, ö, ü). The verbs are all conjugated in the same manner, except the verb “to be", which may be used in compound, shortened forms.

Turkish is also an agglutinative language:  a word could bear many affixes and, thus, create another word; verbs can be generated from nouns, and nouns, from verbal roots.

All of that means that the translation, and particularly technical translations, from Turkish into any language should be done with caution. And not only that. In addition to Turkish culture not being well known in Brazil, there is a lack of experts in that language, given there is no official Turkish course in Brazilian universities. That is why All Tasks has a team specialized in the translation of Turkish documents into any language.