Hungarian Technical Translation

This page was last updated on January 3, 2023.

Essentially, if you are looking for professional Hungarian translation, the best way to go is probably from those immersed in Hungarian culture (or vice versa, in English-speaking cultures).  For someone to study the language as an adult, and then attempt to translate a bunch of highly technical texts and materials about electronic monitoring security systems for a Fortune 500 company - well, you'd be taking a big risk.  English to Hungarian translation is probably a bit easier to find than Hungarian to English translation - but nevertheless, only a professional translation company that you trust should handle highly technical translations from English to Hungarian and vice versa. 

Expert Hungarian Technical Translation for a Fortune 500 Company

Our fantastic Hungarian technical translators recently translated an enormous technical project sent to us from a very prominent Fortune 500 company (sorry, we can't say who, it's against the rules).  The task was to translate technical messages and web content for security and electronic monitoring systems.  There were a total of 9 documents, each with at least several hundred technical messages, texts and pieces of content to translate for their appropriate electronic monitoring system.  That would be hard to do in any language translation, let alone technically in nature Hungarian translation. 

Thank goodness we have an outstanding chunk of what are probably only a few hundred professional Hungarian technical translators in the world - it's not like looking for French or Italian or even Chinese translation.

Hungarian: One of the Most Difficult Languages for English Translation

There are plenty of language service providers out there that will inevitably be very easy to find - some almost too easy, making it difficult to weed out the novices and the under-qualified from the professional translation.  This is definitely not the case when it comes to Hungarian to English or English to Hungarian technical translation.  Why?  Because for English speakers, Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn, let alone translate.

Of the many challenges the language poses, Hungarian contains a very different and very complex grammatical system from English. Beyond that, Hungarian is a very unique language, unrelated even to neighboring nations and languages, and different in nearly every way to English.  It is its own thing - so, there's no real linguistic point of reference, either, to help language-learners or translators out. 

Just so you know, this opinion is not ours - linguist scholars and professors collectively voted it to be so, in more than one feature or research article. But, to be fair, Basque is typically voted as the number one most difficult, followed by Hungarian, while Finnish, Estonian, Chinese and Russian are also usually voted onto a "most difficult languages" list.  Here's just a few reasons why the Hungarian language is widely viewed as one of the world's most difficult:

• Hungarian has a whopping 21 grammatical "cases" - something not found in English, but which exists in nearly every Slavic language, as well as Finnish and others.  Grammatical cases typically change any given noun's ending, spelling, pronunciation, etc depending upon prepositions, direct objects, indirect objects, and so on.

• Hungarian is very counterintuitive to English speakers in many ways - for example, in a possessive clause in English, the noun is altered: Sam's bike.  In Hungarian, the possessed object is what changes.  There are many differences like this which may be small, but which make it difficult in an English-Hungarian comparison.

• The languages are so distantly related that vocabulary is very difficult to learn as well.  Even words which may have some kind of similar root are impossible to recognize phonetically.

• Plurals are also "backwards" in Hungarian.  In English, as well as most other languages, plural nouns are used for numbers greater than one, i.e: one car, single car, four cars, several cars, white cars, dark cars, railroad cars.  In Hungarian, the plural noun is only used if a number or amount is not specified - which is hard enough to understand without putting into practice.