Romanian Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Romanian Language

The Romanian language is a Romance language, meaning it comes from Latin like French, Spanish and Italian. It has 66% Latin-based words and 20% Slavic-based words.

Romanian is also the most spoken language in Moldova, which is northeast of Romania. In Moldova, they refer to Romanian as Moldavian. However, there are certain differences, such as the dialect and a Moldavian accent.

Romanian descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman provinces of Southeastern Europe. Roman inscriptions show that Latin was primarily used to the north of the so-called Jireček Line (a hypothetical boundary between the predominantly Latin- and Greek-speaking territories of the Balkan Peninsula in the Roman Empire), but the exact territory where Proto-Romanian (or Common Romanian) developed cannot certainly be determined. Most regions where Romanian is now widely spoken—Bessarabia, Bukovina, Crișana, Maramureș, Moldova, and significant parts of Muntenia—were not incorporated in the Roman Empire. Other regions—Banat, western Muntenia, Oltenia and Transylvania—formed the Roman province of Dacia Traiana for about 170 years. According to the "continuity" theory, modern Romanian is the direct descendant of the Latin dialect of Dacia Traiana and developed primarily in the lands now forming Romania; the concurring "immigrationist" theory maintains that Proto-Romanian was spoken in the lands to the south of the Danube and Romanian-speakers settled in most parts of modern Romania only centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Most scholars agree that two major dialects developed from Common Romanian by the 10th century. Daco-Romanian (the official language of Romania and Moldova) and Istro-Romanian (a language spoken by no more than 2,000 people in Istria) descended from the northern dialect. Two other languages, Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, developed from the southern version of Common Romanian. These two languages are now spoken in lands to the south of the Jireček Line.

Romanian Translation Expertise

Romanian is the only Romance language that retained a case system, with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, vocative) that affect noun and adjective forms. The definite article is enclitic — attached to the end of the noun rather than placed before it — which is unique among major Romance languages and affects how names and titles are parsed. Legal Romanian uses Latin-derived technical vocabulary that can appear deceptively similar to equivalent terms in other Romance languages while carrying different legal meanings.

Romanian uses the Latin alphabet with five special characters: a, a, i, s, and t. The characters s-comma and t-comma are the correct diacritics under current Romanian orthographic standards, though s-cedilla and t-cedilla variants persist in many digital documents due to legacy encoding issues. Accurate diacritics are important as they affect meaning — for example, "tara" (country) versus "tara" (without diacritics, ambiguous).

Common Romanian Documents

Romanian documents commonly requiring translation include the certificat de naștere (birth certificate), certificat de căsătorie (marriage certificate), diplomă de bacalaureat (secondary school diploma), and cazier judiciar (criminal record certificate).

NAATI certification for Romanian is available but the number of certified translators is limited, reflecting the relatively small Romanian community in Australia. Demand has increased with growing Romanian migration, and translators with NAATI certification can be found primarily in Melbourne and Sydney.

About the Romanian Language

Romanian is the only Romance language that retained the Latin case system, with five grammatical cases that would be recognisable to an ancient Roman — making it structurally closer to Latin than French, Spanish, or Italian in this respect. The definite article in Romanian is attached to the end of the noun rather than placed before it (lupul means "the wolf"), a feature unique among Romance languages that developed through contact with Slavic and Balkan neighbours. Despite being surrounded entirely by Slavic, Hungarian, and Turkic language zones, Romanian maintained its Latin core — an isolated "island of Latinity" that has survived 2,000 years since Roman colonisation of Dacia.