Spanish: Translation & conference interpreting

Spanish is a Romance language and is part of the Indo-European language family. With Aragonese, Asturleonesian, Galician and Portuguese, Spanish forms the group of Ibero-Romance languages. More broadly, it belongs to the Western Romance languages along with French, Portuguese, Catalan and Occitan.

Spanish is the official language in 21 countries and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Worldwide, there are about 400 million native Spanish speakers and around 100 million people who speak it as a foreign language. Spanish is the most common native language on the American continent.

In some aspects, the Spanish spoken in Latin and Central America varies widely from the European Spanish regarding pronunciation and vocabulary, and in the written language, there are also differences that the Spanish translator has to consider. Obviously, the specialist translator or interpreter needs to know these major and minor linguistic differences to guarantee optimal translation and interpreting. If you entrust AP Fachübersetzungen with your Spanish translation or interpreting job, you can be sure that we will use the most suitable language mediator for you.

In the case of certified translations, we only use publicly appointed and sworn Spanish translators for legal documents who have many years of experience to ensure the impeccable quality and correctness of your Spanish translation. To guarantee the success of your interpreting project, we use our best court, consecutive, trade fair, telephone, GMP, liaison, conference and simultaneous interpreters for Spanish. At AP Fachübersetzungen, your Spanish interpreting and translation projects are in the best of hands.

Like all Romance languages, the Spanish language also developed out of Vulgar Latin. The development of Spanish can roughly be divided into the periods of Old Spanish (1200-1450), Early Modern Spanish (1450-1650) and Modern Spanish (starting from 1650).

Apart from the obvious Latin influences, the Arabic language used by the Moorish conquerors shaped the Spanish language since the 8^th century as well, and thus over 1,000 arabisms can still be found in the Spanish vocabulary today. This makes Spanish the Romance language with the most Arabic loan words.

The Spanish language was widely propagated, especially due to the expansion by Spanish kings in the course of colonization and imperialism, since 1492 mainly on the South American continent.

The Spanish alphabet contains the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet as well as some other special characters (e.g. ñ). There are also particularities in Spanish punctuation. Questions and exclamations in Spanish do not only have a question mark or exclamation mark at the end of a sentence but also at the beginning, and upside down: How are you? - ¿Cómo estás?

The orthography in Spanish resembles the pronunciation as much as possible, and the spelling of foreign words is usually adapted to the Spanish pronunciation.

Unlike German, which has three genders, Spanish only has two different genders, masculine and feminine. Instead, there are over 50 conjugated forms per verb in Spanish. Many of them are irregular, and non-native speakers can only master them by strict rote learning. In contrast, the number of inflections of verbs, nouns and determinatives is much smaller. But the Spanish language mediator has to think differently when it comes to the position of adjectives in a sentence. While adjectives in German come before the reference word, they are generally placed after the noun that they refer to in Spanish.

Unlike German or English, Spanish is known to be a pro-drop language. This means that personal pronouns in the Spanish language can simply be omitted in many cases if they are not absolutely necessary for understanding, or they are only added to put particular emphasis on something. In German, this would lead to a loss of meaning and be seen as a grammatical error. However, in the Spanish language and in some other Romance languages, this is an accepted part of standard grammar.

Due to all these particularities of the Spanish language, it is advisable to entrust the translation of your specialist texts or interpretation to a native speaker or very experienced language expert. Therefore, at AP Fachübersetzungen we work exclusively with certified and experienced Spanish translators and interpreters and can thus guarantee the high quality and accuracy of your specialist translation. With us, your Spanish translation and interpreting projects are always in the best of hands.