Spanish
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Eisenmann Übersetzungsteam provides technical translations by native speakers of Spanish into and from Spanish 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 Spanish into their mother tongues (Spanish or German), as per the native speaker principle. All translations between Spanish and German are completed in accordance with DIN EN 15038.
The minimum price for a translation is €30, excluding VAT.
The Spread of Spanish
The Spanish language belongs to the Romance branch of Indo-European languages. It is often categorised together with Catalan and Portuguese as an Ibero-Romance language.
Written Spanish was characterised mainly by the use of language in the central Spanish region of Castile, and in order to keep the language separate from the other language variants spoken in Spain, in particular Galician and Catalan, High Spanish was termed the Castilian language.
Latin letters are used in Spanish, yet the modern language also features acute accents for pronunciation purposes, and uses the letters ñ and ü.
Worldwide there are around 360 million people whose mother tongue is Spanish, living in (for example) Spain, Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, Nicaragua, Chile, the USA, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Cuba and Peru. Add to this the people who speak Spanish as a second language and we get roughly 420 million speakers worldwide. Spanish is an official language in the following countries: Equatorial Guinea, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Equador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and the USA. It is also an official language in the European and African Unions, as well as in the United Nations.
Consequently, Spanish is the fourth most-commonly spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and English.
The History of Spanish
When we consider the historical development of Spanish, we can say that it has been characterised by numerous influences.
The earliest inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula (to our knowledge) were the Iberians; a people of African origins. In around 600 BC, the Celts crossed the Pyrenees and mixed with the Iberians to form the so-called Celtiberians. Basque, spoken by around 850,000 people in the Bay of Biscay on both sides of the Franco-Spanish border, is the only linguistic remnant of that age, termed the Pre-Roman Era.
From the 3rd Century onwards, the Romans began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and until the Gothic invasion in 414 people across the entire Iberian Peninsula spoke local variations. Although the Goths controlled Spain for over 300 years, they had relatively little influence on the language and on social life. There are, therefore, only a few words of German origins to be found in Spanish today.
The conquest of Spain by the Arabs, who in 711 began an expansion out of Africa to the east and north of the peninsula, brought with it a deep-reaching and permanent influence on the Spanish language. For several centuries the Arabs ruled all of Spain, and when the reconquest of Spain was brought to a close in 1492 with the fall of Granada, many Arabic elements had already seeped into Spanish. Borrowed Arabic words include "aceite" ("oil") and "aceituna" ("olive").
The reforms introduced by Ferdinand III (1217-1252) and Alfonso X (1252-1282) were of great linguistic significance. These reforms abolished Latin as the language of documents and replaced it with Castilian. After the union of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1479, Castilian became the national language of the Kingdom of Spain.
Language Variants of Spanish
One variant of Spanish is Judaeo-Spanish, or Ladino. This was the language spoken by the Sephardim; Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. They now live in Greece, Turkey, Israel, North Morocco and the USA.
Today, we have to distinguish between the Spanish spoken on the Iberian Peninsula and Argentinean Spanish, American Spanish, Spanglish and the variation of American Spanish spoken in the Spanish-speaking countries of Middle and South America.
Through its wide dissemination as the fourth most-commonly spoken language in the world, Spanish is not just one of the main working languages of all European and international organisations such as the European Parliament and the United Nations, but also one of the most-commonly translated and interpreted languages in the world.
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Updated November 2022
