Czech Translations

POZENA’s professional Czech translations

• Czech is a member of the West Slavic subgroup, which is a branch of the Slavic languages. In its spoken form, the language developed from the 10th century, while its oldest written records date back to the 13th century. The late medieval period and the beginning of the modern era saw the rise of the Czech language, which at the time exerted an influence on Polish. A key role in the standardization of Czech was played by Jan Hus, who reformed Czech orthography, introducing new diacritics (the Hussite alphabet consists of as many as 42 letters). In the 17th and 18th centuries, the language ceased to develop and was displaced by German. In the early 19th century, Czech experienced revival when the modern literary standard began to emerge. At present, čeština is regulated by the Institute of the Czech Language.
• Czech dialects are mutually intelligible (speakers of Czech can also understand many Slovak dialects). There are also two general varieties of the Czech language: literary Czech (spisovná čeština) and colloquial Czech (obecná čeština), which differ syntactically and stylistically. The lexical differences are much less pronounced, though.
• Czech is one of the official languages of the European Union.

• In Czech, there are both long and short vowels. The former are distinguished by the presence of diacritics: the acute accent, as in á, é, í, ó, ý or a ring as in ů.
• Another distinctive feature of the Czech language is consonant clusters which are very difficult to pronounce even by speakers of other Slavic languages. An extreme example is the six-consonant word scvrkl (Eng. shrunk). It is even possible to compose sentences that do not contain a single vowel, such as the tongue twister Strč prst skrz krk (Eng. Push your finger through the neck).
• Czech is a morphologically rich language. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners and participles are declined for seven cases. There are four grammatical genders: masculine animate (for males and higher animals), masculine inanimate (lower animals and things), feminine and neuter.
• One of the longest Czech words is the 34-letter adjective nejnezkomercionalizovávatelnejšího, which means “unable to be commercialized” (in the superlative degree).