German Language Translation
Our Professional German translation services utilize only native speakers to ensure quality and precision translations for your target audience. With German in particular, a deep understanding of German culture, as well as the language, is needed for translation to be successful. When doing business in German, professional, human translation is a must.
Accuracy is a must
The highest quality translations, brisk turnaround schedules, competitive rates, and sharing of our knowledge, are all requisites for Capitalhead's success. The complete and accurate translation of your company's communications is vital to your success. That's why Capitalhead is obsessed with providing the best translators for YOUR project. High-quality translations are the product of a highly talented and experienced translation team with expertise in your industry. Capitalhead puts all the pieces together to make it happen.
We are proud of our excellent reputation for reliable and high quality German to English and English to German translation services. We have assembled teams of translators from around the world, with an array of skills and specialties and can custom fit the knowledge and strengths of our teams to your specific projects.
Need to get the “gist” of German?
Although professional translation is highly recommended for any business, legal or sincere correspondence in German, sometimes it’s necessary to use machine translation (or translation software) to get the gist of an e-mail or web page. By no means is software translation an acceptable substitute for professional translation, but it is great for getting the general idea of an article, e-mail, website, etc.
German Language Statistics
- German is the most widely spoken native language in the EU.
- Germany boasts a 99% literacy rate.
- German belongs to the three most learned languages in the world as well as the ten most widely spoken languages in the world.
- German is among the top five most widely used languages on the Internet.
- One fourth of the tourists in the U.S. are German speaking.
- Germany is the second most popular European destination for American tourists.
- German is the official language in seven countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, as well as parts of Italy and Belgium).
- German is spoken by over 130 million people world-wide.
- With 23.3 %, German-Americans represent the largest ethnic group in America today (according to the 1990 Census). Some prominent examples include Albert Einstein, Levi Strauss, Henry Kissinger, and Werner von Braun.
- The German publishing industry ranks #3 in the world.
- In Europe, Germany is leading in many scientific fields, such as environmental research. Many scientific articles are published in German; and almost half of all the pharmaceuticals used in the U.S. come from Germany or Switzerland.
Translation Issues with German
Capitalhead has extensive experience with commercial and technical translations from English to German and from German into English. We have also amassed years of experience in typesetting German content. Here are some of the common issues with English to German translation that we have learned:
- German translation typically expands 15 - 25% in size from English (moreso if hyphenation is not addressed), so original document layouts will need to expand as well, to accommodate this additional text.
- Most current applications can accept German text directly, however fonts using non-standard encodings may not correctly display the umlauted characters (ä, ö, ü) and the “sharfes S” (ß)—although this is rare. However, be sure to test this with the fonts in which you want to typeset.
- Even though typesetting of German doesn’t pose any major technical obstacles, hyphenation may be an issue. Be sure your desktop publishing/word processing software has the ability to support German hyphenation dictionaries or consider using left-aligned text without hyphenation.
- Given the many long compound nouns, hyphenation is even more of an issue for documents that use narrow columns to layout the text.
- For projects requiring audio spoken in German, be sure to choose voiceover talent that uses the preferred dialect of your target audience. A heavy Bavarian accent may not be well received by your audience in Berlin. It’s best to choose broadcast-quality talent for most projects.
German Language Vital Information
Speaking Population: 120 Million
Where Spoken: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein
Writing Systems: Latin script + ä, ö, ü, ß
Code Pages:28591 ISO 8859-1 Latin 1
1252 ANSI – Latin 1
10000 MAC - Roman
20924 IBM EBCDIC - Latin-1/Open System (1047 + Euro)
1141 IBM EBCDIC - Germany (20273 + Euro)
20106 IA5 German
20273 IBM EBCDIC - Germany
Unicode Supported: Yes
[Permalink] - Updated: Saturday, August 30, 2008