Translation Services Help Your Family Grow Closer

I am a blonde Viking. I would love to decipher the documents my Norwegian ancestors left for our family, but alas, the language was lost somewhere between great great and great Grandma. Did you inherit documents in another language? Take advantage of the modern day convenience of translation services and enjoy the treasure of family secrets in your inherited letters and diaries. Whether you need a hebrew translation or a norwegian translation, there are experts in all languages, ready to help you.

Today you can translate in a do-it-yourself fashion, but only within limits. It is easy to translate word for word on the Internet, using free translator tools, but translating more than one word gets tricky. I speak German fluently, but I often find a word that I cannot remember. I just Google it and up pops several choices of German-English dictionaries. This meets my needs, most of the time, but only for defining one word in a sentence that I otherwise understand. Try translating an entire letter by yourself, word for word, and you end up with a gobbly gook of a mess.

You save time and you do it right by hiring a professional translator. Although there are online sources where you can enter an entire letter from another language and have it immediately translated into English, just try it and you will see many errors and strange phrases that you know cannot be right. Part of the reason for these errors is the flexible nature of linguistics. Languages change constantly as people adopt new words and idioms. What was a language 100 years ago is a different language today. Just look at old English!

Then there are dialects. One language may have thousands of dialects. The languages with several dialects are difficult to translate accurately. You need an expert translator who is familiar with the dialects of the language. German is a language with many dialects, and in fact, it is common that German people in Berlin do not understand German people in Munich, so different are the dialects.

If I hire a professional to do my Norwegian translation, will I find treasure? Perhaps I will literally find instructions in my great great Norwegian Grandmother's diary on where to find buried treasure. Okay, maybe that is slightly wishful thinking. Actually, my goal is to feel closer to my roots and more connected to my distant cousins in Norway.

The penny pincher in me would like to just find someone who speaks fluent Norwegian, and bypass the professional translator. However, a wee bit of research proved that a staggering 1.62% of the five million Norwegian Americans in the USA speak Norwegian. In addition, if I were to track down that 1.62% of people, how would I be sure of their level of Norwegian comprehension? I know a few Norwegian speakers in town, but all of them speak at a grade-school level, as they are second generation Norwegians who speak mostly English. I am sure they would be guessing half the time at my ancestor's old, scribbly Norwegian.

I have decided I do not want to waste my time in a painful, probably lengthy search for the 1.62% of Americans who speak Norwegian, and then take the risk of trusting them with family heirlooms. Choosing a professional norwegian translation is an investment in my heritage, my family, and my life.

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