Kurdish Translation

History

Sorani is a Central Kurdish dialect in the Indo-Iranian language family. A majority language of Iran and, along with Arabic, one of the official languages of Iraq, it is the second most widely spoken Kurdish language. It is the principal language of education, the media and government in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and is spoken by an estimated 9 million people worldwide.

Sorani has the most developed modern literary tradition of all Kurdish dialects, which, despite being referred to as dialects, can be considered as separate languages since they each vary significantly in grammar, writing system and vocabulary. Although not in the same language family, Sorani uses the Arabic script and spelling system.

Layout and translation requirements

As the many varied dialects of Kurdish are often referred to simply as ‘Kurdish’, it is important to be aware of the specific target language group for translations. For example, Kurmanji and Sorani, the two Kurdish dialects with the most speakers, are not mutually intelligible and even use different alphabets, with Kurmanji being written in Latin script.

Since Sorani is written from right-to-left, the formatting of the final translated text – especially for websites and graphics – can vary significantly compared to the original English text. Far from simply realigning a text, tables and charts will often need to be reordered and reversed.

Embarrassing issues can arise without careful reformatting of Sorani translations. During this process, a native speaker will make sure the right-to-left alignment is done properly, adapt the font to match the English source text if the chosen font isn’t available for Sorani and ensure the correct character encoding so that the text displays properly. In website translation, when characters aren’t properly encoded, they may display as blank boxes or strange symbols. This can make the text difficult to read and doesn’t look very professional.

Kurdish Translation Services