Hungarian Translations

POZENA’s professional Hungarian translations

• Hungarian is a member of Finno-Ugric languages, a branch of the Uralic language family. Its origins are the subject of controversy: some researchers have argued that it is genetically related to the languages from other families, such as Turkish, Etruscan or even Japanese. Around three thousand years ago, Hungarian emerged from the other languages of the Finno-Ugric subfamily. The oldest preserved text in Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer from the late 12th century. Magyar was greatly influenced by the Turkic languages as in the 16th and 17th centuries part of Hungary was under the Ottoman Empire rule. The 18th century saw the start of the standardization process, which gave rise to modern Hungarian.
• Hungarian is made up of eight dialects, which are mutually intelligible (major differences are found in pronunciation). One exception to this is the Csango dialect spoken by an ethnic group living in Romania. This ethnolect has preserved many features of medieval Hungarian. Magyar is now regulated by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
• Hungarian is an official language of the EU.

• Hungarian is an agglutinative language, in which morphemes are suffixed to word stems to form new words or word forms. Semantically, such a word corresponds to several words in most Indo-European languages.
• An excellent example of the above-mentioned phenomenon is the longest Hungarian word, folyamatellenőrzésiügyosztályvezetőhelyettesképesítésvizsgálat, which consists of as many as 62 letters. It can be translated into English as ‘inquiry of qualification for deputy head of the process control department’.
• Another interesting feature of Hungarian grammar is 18 noun cases (this number is disputable). There are no grammatical genders.
• What also distinguishes Hungarian from many modern languages is that Hungarians usually put their last name (family name) first, ahead of the given name, also when they introduce themselves. Therefore, the Hungarian for My name is Zoltan Kovács is Kovács Zoltan hívnak.
• Word stress in Hungarian is fixed and falls on the first syllable.
• The vowel e is pervasive in Hungarian words. There is even a special game called Esperente, which consists in creating well-formed sentences or whole stories by only using words with the e vowel. The rules also apply to definitions. For example, the Internet has been defined as: Egy remek rendszer, mellyel embereket, meg rengeteg elemet megkereshetsz (Eng. An excellent system that helps you find people and a lot of other things)