Italian: Translation & telephone interpreting

Italian is an/the official language in Italy, San Marino, Croatia and Slovenia, Switzerland and Vatican City. It is also an official language of the European Union. Italian is not only spoken by around 70 million people as a native language but also by around 20 million people as a foreign language. It is a Romance language that stems from (Vulgar) Latin and belongs to the Indo-European languages and the Italo-Romance languages within this branch.

Italy is a country with a rich language culture, and to some extent, the Italian dialects vary so much that they are classified as separate languages. Some regional languages of Italy are now considered endangered, because the number of primary speakers is falling drastically. In addition, many languages are spoken that are no longer considered to be Italian dialects but completely separate languages. These linguistic minorities include Sicilian, Lombard, Corsican and Roma.

Thus, there is not only one kind of Italian. The specialist translator or interpreter has to know the major and minor linguistic differences to guarantee optimal translation and interpreting. If you entrust the interpreting and translation company AP Fachübersetzungen, which is renowned far beyond Nuremberg, with your Italian translation or interpreting project, you can be sure that we will find the suitable language mediator for you, even at very short notice.

In the case of certified translations, we only use experienced, publicly appointed and sworn Italian translators for public documents to guarantee the impeccable quality and correctness of your Italian translation. To ensure the maximum success of your Italian interpreting project, we use our best court, consecutive, liaison, conference and simultaneous interpreters.

As with all modern Romance languages, the origins of the modern Italian language date back to Vulgar Latin, spoken in the Roman Empire. The language known as Italian today began to develop at the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the 14^th century, the Tuscan dialect of Italian became widely spread in many regions of Italy. Factors contributing to the spread of the Tuscan dialect include the central geographical location of Tuscany and the increasing prosperity of the city of Florence. The Tuscan-Italian dialect was popular for centuries and developed into a standard variety, one of the reasons being that it was spoken by the aristocracy and the intellectual elite.

When Italy was unified in 1861, the language was also unified, which was evident in the Italian school system, among others. Since Italians all spoke different dialects, the introduction of a common language as a meaningful historical event led to an increase in literacy levels and a higher rate of discovery of Italian dialects.

The basic form of the Italian alphabet consists of 21 letters, but there are ten letters with additions, such as ì oder é. The pronunciation of Italian is reflected by the orthography in quite a regular way. Like all Romance languages, the Italian language also has only two genders (masculine and feminine), whereas German has a third gender (neuter). However, unlike in German or in other Romance languages such as French, the gender of the noun is almost always determined by the ending. The word order in Italian is relatively free compared to European languages. Thus, the verb can have different positions in a sentence and adjectives can sometimes come after or before the noun.

A fact to consider when translating is that personal pronouns in Italian can be omitted, which is incorrect in German. In addition, there are more tenses and grammatical moods in the Italian language than in the German language. It should also be noted that some tenses seem to have an equivalent in German, but are often used completely differently in Italian.

Due to the special grammatical features of the Italian language, it is advisable to entrust the translation of your specialist texts or interpretation to a native speaker or very experienced language expert. We at AP Fachübersetzungen work exclusively with certified and experienced Italian translators and specialist interpreters and can thus guarantee the impeccable quality and accuracy of the translation and interpreting service.