Croatian translation services

Croatian translation services Diskusija offers

Diskusija offers top-quality Croatian translation services provided by a select team of highly-qualified, native Croatian translators. Their diverse areas of specialization mean we’re able to handle almost any content you send our way, be it legal, financial, technical or otherwise, all the while maintaining the highest level of professional quality. Our regional expertise and more than a decade of expertise in dealing with South-eastern European language projects make us the perfect partner to offer a tailor-made solution to your Croatian translation needs.

For Croatian translation, we mainly work in the combinations listed below:

English to Croatian
German to Croatian
French to Croatian

This is not to say, of course, that we don’t work with Croatian in other language combinations – should you find yourself in need of translation between Croatian and a language other than those listed, please get in touch, and we’ll do our utmost to find a solution that suits your needs.

Croatian translation services

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About the Croatian language

The Croatian language is a South Slavic language, which has approximately 6 million speakers and is the official language of Croatia. It is also one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina along with Serbian and Bosnian. Croatian is very close to these languages. All of them are mutually intelligible. Actually, their spoken forms differ less than American, British and Australian English.

The Croatian standard language is based on the Shtokavian dialect, which is also the basis of Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin. There are two other dialects – Chakavian and Kajkavian.

The Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian languages are generally referred to as “Serbo-Croatian languages”, although it is best not to refer to this when speaking with native speakers.

The main differences in the written forms of those languages are the alphabets. Croatian uses Latin, Serbian – Cyrillic. This is due to the influence of religion – people in the territories of present-day Croatia came under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and Roman culture. The eastern region, where Serbia is now, turned to the Eastern Orthodox Church and Constantinople and Russia for its religious and cultural model.

Modern language: alphabet, vocabulary, spelling, grammar

Nowadays Croatian speakers, as well as Bosnian and Serbian speakers are keen to emphasise the differences between their languages. After the collapse of the SFR Yugoslavia, language became one of the means of differentiating their ethnic identities.

In the Croatian language, measures were taken to rid the language of the Serbian influence it had felt since the middle of the 19th century.

Modern Croatian vocabulary contains many words of Latin and German origin but many new Croatian words are created by combining and adapting existing ones.

Croatian grammar is most often referred to as Serbo-Croatian grammar. In Croatian, pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some numerals inflect and verbs change for person and tense.

The basic word order in a sentence is “subject-verb-object”, but this is not as important as in English and is often deviated to show particular mood, tone, or for emphasis. Such deviations often appear in literary texts.

Croatian nouns have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), which are identified by the word endings: nouns ending in “-a” are feminine, “-o”, “-e” are neutral, the rest are mostly masculine. The gender of the noun also affects adjectives, pronouns and verbs that accompany it.

There are 7 declensions for nouns: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Locative and Instrumental.

According to their aspect, verbs are divided into perfect or imperfect. Verbs have seven tenses, but only four of them – the present, perfect, future I and II are used in modern standard Croatian. The other three – aorist, imperfect and pluperfect – are used rarely.

History of the Croatian language

The rise of written Croatian is connected with the adoption of the Old Church Slavonic language as the liturgy language in the 9th century. The first written texts in pure Croatian that showed distinct differences from Church Slavonic are dated to the 13th century.

Modern Croatian emerged in the 14-15th century and differs only slightly from the standard Croatian language of our times.

The Latin alphabet was standardised in 1830-1850.

In the 19th century, there were attempts to create a common South Slavic language for political reasons. In the end, the Serbian and Croatian languages were merged into the Serbo-Croatian language. This continued in the 20th century, when the Socialist Federal Republic Yugoslavia was formed.

In 1954, under Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, the Novi Sad Agreement was established, declaring Serbo-Croatian to be a single official language. This agreement was maintained until the collapse of the SFR Yugoslavia in 1991. During these years, the Serbian language heavily influenced Croatian because there were more Serbs than Croats.

After the fall of the SFR Yugoslavia, the Serbian and Croatian languages were separated and that marked, as was generally agreed, “the death of the Serbo-Croatian language”.

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