West Germanic languages: English, German, Dutch, and others
The West Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 500 million people mainly in North America, Oceania, Southern Africa and Europe.
The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers, German with over 100 million native speakers and Dutch with 23 million native speakers.
Other major West Germanic languages are Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch; Low German; Yiddish and Limburgish.
All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic language. These probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from c. 500 BC. Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. 500 BC.
The Germanic languages is closely connected with the development of Western civilization.
Indo-European Language Tree
In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, by far the highest of any language family.
Germanic languages, branch of the Indo-European language family. Scholars often divide the Germanic languages into three groups: West Germanic, including English, German, and Netherlandic (Dutch); North Germanic, including Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese; and East Germanic, now extinct, comprising only Gothic and the languages of the Vandals, Burgundians, and a few other tribes.
The 10 Oldest Languages Still Spoken In The World Today
Nordic-Baltic Translation agency Baltic Media is a leading provider of digital translation services in Northern Europe specializing in Northern European (incl. Nordic (Scandinavian), Baltic, Slavic, West Germanic) languages mostly in translation services from/into
Lithuanian, and
As an ISO certified Scandinavian-Baltic language service provider, translation agency Baltic Media offers human translation services for corporate, public and individual clients.
The main offices of the translation agency are in Stockholm (Sweden) and Riga (Latvia).
Human Translation
All our translations are done and edited by human beings. The term human translation is used as opposed to machine translation. Human translation is executed by a human translator, whereas machine-translation is executed by a translation machine and edited by a post-editor.
Our human translators do translations ONLY into their native language and reside in the country where this language is either the official language or the language prevalent in social life. We have our own translator testing system. Criteria: linguistic education, at least 5 years of experience in translation, references from other clients, test translation. Learn more here.
The Best Translator is Human
Human translation (HT) is the oldest form of translation, relying on pure human intelligence to convert one way of saying things to another. It remains the most widely-used translation method to this day. Human translation is your best investment when accuracy is even remotely important.
While automated translation solutions are incredibly fast at translating large volumes of content, their output is far from business-ready. Humans can interpret context and capture the same meaning as the source text, rather than simply machine translating word-for-word.
With all grammatical inconsistencies and unnatural phrasing, machine translation looks like spam for Google. Proper multilingual SEO requires professional human translation.
Translation Memories, Terminology Databases and Style Guides
When you need a high-quality human translation for a larger project, we can offer a crowd-based platform, when many human translators work simultaneously. The crowd-based approach may offer more value for your money.
Our human translators use CAT-tools (computer-assisted translation tools) allowing to create a translation memory for future use, Text Editor software, style guides and glossaries that help us to maintain consistent terminology.
We save the memory of your translations to avoid duplicate work in the future. Translation memories (TMs) will enable you to save money across your documents and projects. Your savings may be as high as 70%. Please note that translation memory is not the same as machine translation.
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