Vietnamese Health Medical Translation

About the Vietnamese Language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese.

Like many languages from Asia the Vietnamese language is a tonal language. Today, it uses a Latin alphabet based on the French alphabet. The Vietnamese alphabet was once based on Chinese characters. It is called Chữ Nôm. Fewer people know Chữ Nôm today.

Vietnamese was identified more than 150 years ago as part of the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (a family that also includes Khmer, spoken in Cambodia, as well as various tribal and regional languages, such as the Munda and Khasi languages spoken in eastern India, and others in southern China). Later, Muong was found to be more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung, Chut, Cuoi, etc. The term "Vietic" was proposed by Hayes (1992), who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Muong. The term "Vietic" is used, among others, by Gérard Diffloth, with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Muong" refers to a lower subgrouping (within an eastern Vietic branch) consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Muong dialects, and Nguồn (of Quảng Bình Province).

Vietnamese is increasingly being taught in schools and institutions outside of Vietnam. In countries with strongly established Vietnamese-speaking communities such as Australia, Canada, France, and the United States, Vietnamese language education largely serves as a cultural role to link descendants of Vietnamese immigrants to their ancestral culture. Meanwhile, in countries near Vietnam such as Cambodia, Laos, South Korea, and Thailand, the increased role of Vietnamese in foreign language education is largely due to the growth and influence of Vietnam's economy.

Vietnamese Translation Expertise

Vietnamese is a tonal language with six tones in the northern dialect and five in the southern, and meaning depends entirely on correct tone interpretation. The language is isolating — it uses no inflection, conjugation, or declension — instead relying on word order and classifier words to convey grammatical relationships. Vietnamese has distinct northern (Hanoi) and southern (Saigon) standard forms with differences in vocabulary and pronunciation that can affect how official documents are interpreted, and translators must recognise which variant they are working with.

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ) with extensive diacritical marks — tone marks and vowel modifications can stack, giving characters like ở, ệ, and ữ. The script has 29 letters including đ, and accurate diacritical rendering is essential as removing or misplacing marks changes meaning entirely.

Common Vietnamese Documents

Commonly translated documents include giấy khai sinh (birth certificates), giấy đăng ký kết hôn (marriage certificates), sổ hộ khẩu (household registration books), police clearance certificates, and academic transcripts from Vietnamese universities.

NAATI offers certification for Vietnamese translators, and Vietnamese is one of the most widely available NAATI-certified language pairs in Australia due to the large community. There is a strong supply of qualified NAATI-certified Vietnamese translators across all major cities.

About the Vietnamese Language

Vietnamese is one of the few Asian languages written entirely in the Latin alphabet, thanks to a romanisation system (chữ Quốc ngữ) developed by Portuguese missionaries in the 17th century. A single Vietnamese vowel can carry up to two diacritical marks simultaneously — one for the vowel quality and one for tone — creating characters like ệ and ở that exist in no other language. Vietnamese has six tones in the northern dialect but only five in the southern, and the difference between dialects is significant enough that northern and southern speakers occasionally misunderstand each other.