Polish Translation Services
Our professional Polish translators have the necessary experience and qualifications to translate any document from English to Polish, Polish to English or any other of over 200 languages we support. Our Polish translators are all based in-country and can handle any specialist document such as:
- Legal documents
- Technical documents and manuals
- Brochures, leaflets and marketing copy
- Website translation
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Preparing your document for Polish Translation
There are a few things that should be considered when preparing your document for Polish translation:
- The output text will most certainly be longer than the source text
- Polish words tend to be longer than English ones
- About 20-30% more space should be allowed for a Polish translation
Here is an example of a Polish translation of a short news article:
“Boyle talks about the journey of his film, from ‘indulgent fantasy’ to Oscar contender, the adventure of working in India, and reaching for the stars. Meanwhile, Yeoh tells of the challenges of working with the diva that is mother nature on Asif Kapadia’s cold-climate thriller, going for extremes in her body of work, and being inspired by the indigenous people of the far north.”
“Boyle opowiada o transformacji swojego filmu z “fantazji dla speÅ?nienia marzeÅ?” w kandydata do Oscara, o przygodzie jakÄ? byÅ?a praca w Indiach i siÄ?ganiu do gwiazd. Tymczasem Yeoh mówi o wyzwaniach zwiÄ?zanych z pracÄ? nad thrillerem Asif Kapadiego, którego akcja toczy siÄ? w zimnym klimacie, gdzie dziÄ?ki kapryÅ?nej diwie, jakÄ? jest matka natura, musieli pracowaÄ? w ekstremalnych warunkach, oraz o inspiracji, jakÄ? byli dla niego rdzenni mieszkaÅ?cy dalekiej póÅ?nocy.”
Even though the word count of the translation is very similar to the one of the source text, because Polish words are longer, we end up with one extra line.
Formal Polish Language
Despite recent fast changes, the Polish language still tends to be quite inflexible and formal. Unlike English, there doesn’t seem to be a playful, free style version of Polish that is still good enough for official translations and publications. The majority of Polish is either terribly formal, or completely informal.
This causes a lot of problems in translating a text that is written in “middle-of-the-road” English as there isn’t a Polish equivalent. Consequently such translations might lack stylistic accuracy and similarity to the source text.
The most obvious and easy to illustrate example of this problem is the use of English “you” for addressing basically anyone, in both formal and informal situations.
In Polish this does not exist, it is either very formal “Pan, Pani, PaÅ?stwo”, which sounds very unnatural in some situations, for example on websites, or a completely informal “ty”, which is seen as disrespectful by more conservative Poles.
A translator is often left with a dilemma which of the two evils will be the lesser one, as there is no perfect solution.
Polish Translation Word Order
A very difficult case for a Polish translator is when for certain reasons the translation has to follow the order and number of sentences from the source text. Despite what some poor quality translators think, the Polish sentence structure is different from English, and requires many alterations in translation.
In the translation example above, the structure of the second sentence was changed in order to achieve a good sounding, correct Polish sentence that would still convey the whole meaning of the English source. If we had to stick to the structure of the source text, we would end up with a very ugly, and not very clear, piece of text in Polish.
Unfortunately, this is what many other translators do. Make sure you get the best quality Polish translation by choosing Applied Language Solutions.
Click here for a free no obligation Polish translation quote.
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