Polish
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Eisenmann Übersetzungsteam provides technical translations by native speakers of Polish into and from Polish for all subject areas: economics, law, technology, medicine, advertising, IT etc.
Our subject areas range from finance to law, from technology to advertising, websites, certificates and references.
All texts are translated by experienced specialist translators of Polish into their mother tongues (Polish or German), as per the native speaker principle.
The minimum price for a translation is €30, excluding VAT.
The Spread of Polish
Polish is the official language of Poland, and is spoken by approximately 60 million native speakers. This includes large Polish minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine, Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union, the Czech Republic, the USA, Canada, Germany and France.
The Polish language (poln, jezyk, polski) belongs to the West Slavic languages; a subgroup of the Indo-European language tree, and it is closely related to Czech, Slovakian and Sorbian.
There are several Polish dialects including Lesser Polish (Southeast Poland and Krakow), Silesian (in the Southwest), Masovian (Northeast Poland and Warsaw) and Great Polish (in the north and west). Kashubian (in the north) is called a dialect, particularly in literature, but in fact it is an independent West Slavic language.
The History of Polish
The oldest known records of the Polish language and script date back to the 12th Century. These were names and commentaries in the “Bull of Gniezno”, by Pope Innocent II in the year 1136.
In later times, many religious texts were transferred from Latin to Polish, and in the 15th Century the earlier influence of Czech was gradually pushed back, and written Polish was able to free itself as far as possible from Latin. Until the 16th Century, Polish was predominantly written by chaplains, after which time it noticeably spread in the nobility and middle classes. In the course of the 16th Century, the modern Polish language of literature developed, based on the dialects spoken in the region of Poznan (in western Poland). Examples of writings from this time period are the literature of Till Eulenspiegel and the prose of Mikolaj Rej.
In the past, Polish had the tendency to borrow words from Old Czech, Middle High German and Latin; nowadays borrowed words in Polish mainly stem from Ukrainian, Belarusian, German, French and English.
Particularities of Polish
Polish phonology consists of 6 vowels and 34 consonants which are reproduced in an edited Latin alphabet, adjusted to the phonetic requirements of Polish.
One particular characteristic of Polish is the “I” which is pronounced similarly to English. The difference between long and short vowels was lost over the course of the language’s development, and the word stress was affixed to the last syllable. As an individual Slavic language, Polish contains nasalised vowels (a and e) which developed from the Old Slavic nasalised vowels.
As in almost all Slavic languages, the so-called “dual” - originally present in Polish - has been lost, so that the Polish language of today only has one singular and one plural. The singular has three genders; masculine, feminine and neuter, while in the plural there is one additional category reserved for male people, which differs from the general plural forms for animate and inanimate subjects.
Polish has retained the Old Slavic case system, and contains six cases for substantive, pronouns, adjectives and a seventh case only used in direct addresses for substantives and pronouns; the vocative. The flexion of the verbs in Polish is based on person, number and gender. The Polish tense system was simplified when the three original tenses - aorist, imperfect and pluperfect - were removed. In modern Polish, the so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in everyday language.
In general, it can be said that Polish has a very free word order system in comparison to other languages.
Particularly through Poland’s ascension into the European Union on 1st May 2004 and the resulting opening of Poland’s market to western states, the importance of Polish has grown enormously.
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Updated November 2022
