Polish Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Polish Language

Polish is the official language of Poland and is the most widely spoken Western Slavic language and the second largest Slavic language after Russian.

Today, Polish is spoken by over 38.5 million people as their first language in Poland. Millions of Polish speakers can be found in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Scotland and so on. There are over 50 million Polish language speakers around the world.

The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the Soviet annexation of the Kresy (Eastern Borderlands) in 1939, and the annexation of former German territory after World War II. This tendency toward a homogeneity also stems from the vertically integrated nature of the Polish People's Republic.

The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standardized Polish appear relatively slight. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing regional variations.

Polish is normally described as consisting of four or five main dialects:

• Greater Polish, spoken in the west
• Lesser Polish, spoken in the south and southeast
• Masovian, spoken throughout the central and eastern parts of the country
• Silesian, spoken in the southwest

Kashubian, spoken in Pomerania west of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, is often considered a fifth dialect. It contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs. the five of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages. However, it "lacks most of the linguistic and social determinants of language-hood".

Polish Translation Expertise

Polish has seven grammatical cases, three genders (with masculine further subdivided into personal, animate, and inanimate), and a complex system of consonant clusters that can make names particularly difficult to transliterate consistently. Verb aspect — the distinction between completed and ongoing action — pervades every verb form and must be interpreted correctly for legal precision. Polish legal and bureaucratic language is notably dense, with long sentences and formal constructions inherited from the partitioning powers' administrative traditions.

Polish uses the Latin alphabet with nine additional characters formed by diacritics: a, c, e, l, n, o, s, z, and z. The distinction between similar letters (such as z, z, and rz, all representing different sounds) is essential for correct meaning and name spelling. Polish orthography is consistent but complex, with digraphs like sz, cz, and rz.

Common Polish Documents

Polish documents commonly requiring translation include the akt urodzenia (birth certificate), akt małżeństwa (marriage certificate), świadectwo ukończenia szkoły (school completion certificate), and zaświadczenie o niekaralności (criminal record certificate).

NAATI certification for Polish is well established, with certified translators available in most major Australian cities. Polish has historically been one of the stronger NAATI language pairs due to the large and long-established Polish-Australian community.

About the Polish Language

Polish has more consonant clusters than almost any other European language — the word bezwzględny ("ruthless") contains a run of four consecutive consonants, and tongue-twisters like chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie ("the beetle buzzes in the reeds") are legendary among language learners. The language distinguishes between two separate "ch" sounds, two "sh" sounds, and two "zh" sounds that sound virtually identical to non-native ears but carry different meanings. Poland's constitution of 1791 was the first modern constitution in Europe and only the second in the world after the United States — and its original text remains readable to modern Polish speakers with only minor difficulty.