Professional Icelandic Translation Services

The Icelandic language has many differences from English, which poses a unique set of challenges for translators. Rather than changing the word order in sentences to convey meaning, the words themselves have different endings. A professional English to Icelandic translator will need to understand the core of the word and which ending to use for the meaning of your text to be conserved. In addition, there are three grammatical genders in Icelandic, whereas there are none in the English language. You will also see a lot of verb conjugation used to dictate person, number, tense, and mood, while nouns can be in one of four cases. Alongside an active and passive voice, Icelandic also has a middle voice that needs to be understood. This complex morphology is arguably the biggest challenge for English to Icelandic translation services. Furthermore, the Icelandic language uses unique characters. While still reliant on a Latin script like English, many accents and duplicated letters are also in use such as Þþ which is pronounced as “th” and not to be confused with Pp. Similarly, “eth” is written as Ðð and makes a similar but subtly different “th” sound when spoken.

The Icelandic language is only spoken by around 0.005% of people worldwide. However, it is an official language in Iceland spoken by almost 336,000 of the people living in Iceland. Therefore, anyone looking to break into the Icelandic market needs professional Icelandic translation services. Our network of professional English to Icelandic translators are well-versed in the nuances of the language and grammar. With this large network, we can provide accurate translations in a range of industries. From general document translations to specialised technical translations, we can assign a translator with extensive experience and subject matter expertise. We can also translate English to Icelandic and Icelandic to English for other industries such as academic translation, brand translation, patent translation, and much more.

• There are only around 350,000 Icelandic speakers in the world. This means that only 0.005% of the entire
population on Earth speaks this Nordic language.

• Icelandic was solely a spoken language until its use in Viking sagas. The written form of the language has not
changed much since, so most Icelandic speakers can still read these medieval Icelandic texts.

• The Icelandic alphabet is unique and no other language uses the same combination of characters and letters
for written text.