The Most “Impossible” Languages to Translate

All languages on earth are hard to translate, especially if the translation is done by the wrong person. Just like in a relationship, if the translator and the language are comfortable with one another, their relationship (or translation) will be a success.

  1. Chinese

The most impossible and expensive language to translate is Chinese. The translation is usually done by non-native speakers. Chinese has many forms and dialects and they are all different when it comes to grammar and pronunciation, meaning any character can and will be read in multiple ways and have countless meanings.

  1. Arabic

There is no future tense in Arabic, it only has past and present. Translators must make the new text sound natural to their audience. Arabic has no vowels, or at least no written ones, although they can be heard. The same word can have totally different meanings if one letter is drawn the other way around. All these aspects of the Arabic language make it one of the most difficult to translate in the world.

  1. Thai

In Thai, the same words will have different meanings based on how you pronounce them. To be able to translate from Thai, the translator must be well-informed in a certain field and a master of the language. There are also no capital letters and no spaces between words in Thai. Nospacesbetweenwords! Thai is among the most expensive languages at any translation office. That’s why Thai translators are rare and very costly!

  1. Hungarian

Our neighbors have a complicated language. Hungarian is among the hardest languages to learn and translate on Earth. Hungarian has 35 grammatical cases and has possessive forms and tenses most other languages don’t. Ó Istenem!

  1. Finnish

This language has a very complex grammar and is hard to translate because there are a lot of colloquialisms used when spoken in daily life. Every single word is pronounced differently than how you write it on paper.

  1. Mongolian

Mongolian is a mixture of Chinese, Russian and Finnish. The most “impossible” languages on earth are making this “ultimate” language. Mongols use the Cyrillic alphabet now and because of this, Mongolian is one of the hardest languages to work with for Europeans.