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TECHNICAL TRANSLATION SERVICE IN POLISH

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POLISH: LANGUAGE OF FAITH

Mother tongue of almost 39 million people living in Poland and nearly 20 million in other countries, such as Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Brazil, Polish or Polak is one of the most spoken western Slavic languages, second to Russian.

A nation of busy cities, exuberant forests, historical villages and hidden lakes, Poland has a history marked by the invasions they suffered due to its strategic location in the center of Europe.

The first records of the country date back from 966, when
Mieszko I, prince of the Polans that dwelt in the region of Wielkopolska (Great Poland), introduced Christianity in the country bringing along the Latin alphabet, which enabled that Polak, until then only a spoken language, acquired written form as well.
The first record of the language, however, was made in 1136, with a Papal Bull in which 410 Polak personal and geographical names appeared.
Only in the 16th century did the language become normative, with the influence of dialects from the west and southeast of the country, regions strongly connected with the political and religious centers of Gniezno, Poznań and Krakow. The sole Slavic language that has nasal vowels (ą e ę) stemming from ancient Slavic, Polish is a very inflected language and the verbs are conjugated varying in gender, person and number.
It has seven vowel and 35 consonant phonemes represented by the Latin alphabet. It also has diacritic signals, such as kreska, graphically similar to the acute accent (e.g. ź, ś, originated from Czech): one of the aspects that make the translation of documents in Polish a real challenge.

According to poet and researcher Henryk Siewierski, in an interview to Caderno de Tradução, a publication of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, the Polish-Portuguese dictionaries are too small to be used in any text with higher complexity; and for that reason the translator is often required to perform a field research in search for other alternatives.

Also, the lack of a definite and indefinite articles in Polish, according to the expert, leaves room for a greater indefinability or ambiguity, an extra challenge in translating Polish texts into Portuguese.

Cultural differences between both languages can also compromise the translation of documents in Polish.
As an example he mentions Brazilian sugar cane fields: Poland does not have such plantation, which requires extra care in translating texts on the subject.

In addition, the Polish orthography itself is an issue both for foreigners and Polish natives, seeing as there are words that, despite having similar pronunciation, are written differently. Not to mention the excessive rules and exceptions—the main reason why the language is considered one of the hardest in the world.

All Tasks, specialized in the translation of large-scale technical documentations, technical standards and technical manuals, maintains a highly qualified team to meet demands of translation works into Polish.