Bulgarian: Specialist translation & interpreting

The Bulgarian language is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria and is spoken by the vast majority of people in the country. However, Bulgarian is also widespread in other countries of South Eastern and Eastern Europe and is spoken by around 8 million people worldwide.

Together with Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian, the Bulgarian language is part of the subgroup of South Slavic languages within the Indo-European language family. The Bulgarian language can roughly be divided into two dialects: East Bulgarian and West Bulgarian. Modern Bulgarian is largely based on the East Bulgarian dialect, but the pronunciation is in many ways a cross between the two dialects. The Macedonian language is most closely related to the Bulgarian language. Some linguists would even classify Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian and not as an independent language, but nevertheless it is seen as a separate language.

It is always advisable to entrust the translation of your texts or interpretation to a native speaker of Bulgarian or very experienced language expert. The Nuremberg language agency AP Fachübersetzungen works exclusively with competent and experienced specialist Bulgarian translators and consecutive, court, liaison, conference and simultaneous interpreters to guarantee the impeccable quality and correctness of your translation and the success of your interpreting project. In the case of certified translations, we only employ publicly appointed and sworn Bulgarian translators for official documents with many years of experience. At AP Fachübersetzungen, your certified Bulgarian translation is in professional hands.

The history of the Bulgarian language is divided into three periods: Old Bulgarian (10^th-11^th century), Middle Bulgarian (12^th-15^th century) and New Bulgarian (from the 16^th century onward). The modern Bulgarian literary language developed during the reformation of the Bulgarian education system between 1820 and 1830. Over the course of time, the East Bulgarian dialect superseded the West Bulgarian dialect although West Bulgarian had been the dominant dialect at first. Thus, the East Bulgarian dialect served as a basis for the formation of a uniform written language.

The Bulgarian alphabet contains 30 letters. Like other Slavic languages, the Bulgarian language is written using Cyrillic letters. However, the Bulgarian language has some specific features not common to other Slavic languages: the absence of cases and infinitives, but articles are still used. Regarding grammar, however, Bulgarian is similar to Romanian or Albanian, for example, although these are not Slavic languages. Due to this fact, these languages are grouped together under the term Balkan languages. Since the languages do not belong to the same family, they are called a Sprachbund (language crossroads).

Usually, the orthography in Bulgarian reflects the pronunciation, but there are also a few exceptions. Generally speaking, most letters are pronounced as they are in German or like their German equivalents. Like the German and English language, the Bulgarian language uses articles. But while the article comes before the noun in German and English, it is placed after the noun in the Bulgarian language, which is called a postposed article. The German language has a good number of six tenses; Bulgarian, however, even has nine different tenses. Thus, it is not always easy for the Bulgarian translator to find a good equivalent of a Bulgarian tense that really renders the original meaning correctly if the tense does not exist in German. As already mentioned above, there are no infinitives in the Bulgarian language. Normally, the 1^st person singular present indicative active replaces it in word lists. If German sentences contain an infinitive, it has to be expressed using a more complex sentence construction in the Bulgarian translation.

To a large extent, the Bulgarian vocabulary consists of Slavic native words; however, many loan words from the Turkish and the Greek language were also adopted.