The Albanian language - quality translations by our translation service

• The history of the Albanian language

  Whether or not Albanian evolved from the tribal language of the Illyrians living in ancient times in the region is controversial among scientists because no written evidence of this language exists. The Albanians, an isolated group of people with their own language, have only been known since the eleventh century AD. At that time, they lived in the remote mountain regions in the north of modern Albania and then spread to the South, East, and Adriatic Coast over the course of the following centuries. Their language was partly mixed with Greek and South Slavic languages as they travelled. The first written records of the Albanian language are from the fifteenth century, and the oldest known book printed in Albanian, the Meshari (the Missal), dates back to 1555. During this time, Albanian was known to be written in Latin, Greek, and even Arabic in some cases. This did not change until 1908. A congress of Albanian intellectuals decided that written Albanian in the future should be written exclusively with Latin letters. Also, the participants agreed upon a completely phonetic spelling system. All speech sounds that could not be represented by the Latin alphabet were expressed with letter combinations. The only exceptions were the characters Ç and Ë. There were still two Albanian languages built upon the two main dialects, and it was not until 1978 that a standardised single written language was formed.

• Localisation for Albania

  Are you planning to build your business in Albania, or would you like to invest in an Albanian company? If you want to get your foot in the door and start a business in the country, you need documents translated into Albanian so that you can communicate properly with your new business partners.

  We have a network of native-speaking translators who can translate your texts from English into Albanian or nearly any other language combination you require.

  Are you thinking about building business operations in countries neighbouring Albania? We can translate your texts into several languages. We maintain terminology management protocols to ensure consistency in all of your translations.

  We know how important it is to localise content. Therefore, we exclusively employ native-speaking translators with an academic education and additional knowledge in at least one area of expertise. This is how we find someone with experience and knowledge in your industry.

• Special characteristics of the Albanian language

  Albanian is not just Albanian. In order to translate a text into or from Albanian, you have to be familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the language. The Gheg dialect is spoken in Northwest and Central Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia. Tosk is spoken in southern Albania, the Albanian Adriatic region, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and even Italy. The two dialects are quite different from each other. Although Albanians can understand each other’s dialects well, there are many phonetic, morphological, and lexical differences. The structure of Albanian grammar is comparable to that of Greek and Romanian, but there are also similarities to the grammar of South Slavic languages. Nouns are either masculine or feminine; there is no neutral gender. There are also two base forms for nouns: definite and indefinite. It’s quite challenging to understand how to pluralise Albanian nouns. There are close to a hundred different arrangements to form the plural. The adjectives are placed differently than in English in that they are normally placed behind the noun being modified; many adjectives take no article. Since we exclusively work with native-speaking translators, your translations will always be done accurately and with the specific characteristics of the language in mind. Our translators have been raised speaking the target language and mastered it to the smallest detail.

Affordable quality

There are an estimated 6.5 million people who speak Albanian. This beautiful and historical language of the Balkan region is prevalent, and the number of Albanian speakers living outside the Balkans is estimated at over a million. This is reason enough to obtain professional translations directly from English.

Do you have a document in a language other than English that needs to be translated into Albanian? We can help. Send us your document, and we'll give you a price for machine translation with human editing, certified translation, and even ISO17100 Translations. This can be done 24/7 via our website.