If you thought Russia was solely Russian-speaking, you’re wrong. Russian is indeed the lingua franca of the world’s largest country, used as an official language across the entire territory. But ethnic Russians are only indigenous to the portion of western Russia, with the rest of the country inhabited indigenously by a diverse range of ethnolinguistic groups, many of whom speak a Turkic language. Even in the North Caucasus region, where most indigenous languages are from the Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian language families, you can still find indigenous Turkic languages, such as Karachay-Balkar.
Karachay-Balkar is spoken today by around 310,000 people, most of whom are in Russia. Therefore, the vitality of the language is threatened by Russian, which is widely used and holds more prestige in the region. Classified as “vulnerable” by UNESCO, Karachay-Balkar is not as endangered as some of its neighboring indigenous languages, but nonetheless, its vulnerable status has meant that few translation agencies engage with the language. One of the few is TranslationServices.com, which is proud to present a dedicated Karachay-Balkar translation team.
If you’re interested in Karachay-Balkar translation, reach out today to ask about a free price quote.
Some more information on Karachay-Balkar
Karachay-Balkar finds the majority of its speakers in the Russian republics of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, as well as an immigrant community in Turkey’s Afyonkarahisar Province. The language is shared between the Karachay and Balkar ethnic groups, who settled in the Caucasus region in the 11th century. Karachay-Balkar is a Turkic language, which means it’s related to Turkish but not at all to Russian or most of the other languages native to the Caucasus region, although other Turkic languages, like Kumyk, are also indigenous to the area.
Given that Karachay-Balkar is a Turkic language, it shares common Turkic features, including agglutinativity, vowel harmony, a subject-object-verb word order, and a lack of grammatical gender. Nouns are inflected via six cases, attached in the form of suffixes. Unlike prepositions in English, Karachay-Balkar uses postpositions, which are placed after the respective noun. Karachay-Balkar does not draw a sharp distinction between adjectives and adverbs, as many adjectives can also be used as adverbs and even nouns. An additional challenge presented by Karachay-Balkar is its two parallel number systems: a decimal (base-10) and a vigesimal (base-20) system.
Considering the vast differences between Karachay-Balkar and English, translation is difficult—but our Karachay-Balkar translators are experts with passion and experience guiding them.
Choose between translation into Karachay-Balkar and translation from Karachay-Balkar.
We always strive to offer our clients the ultimate in flexible translation services. We’ve set up our Karachay-Balkar translation team with this goal in mind, ensuring that we can translate both to and from the language. So, if you want to translate historical documents in Karachay-Balkar (whether they’re written in the Arabic script, the Latin script, or the modern-day Cyrillic script), we can do that. We can also translate literature and other content in Karachay-Balkar. Similarly, we can translate questionnaires and educational materials into Karachay-Balkar, as well as content like books, websites, apps, poetry, games, and more. All our translation efforts are guided by passion for the Karachay-Balkar language and its revitalization efforts.
To get started with Karachay-Balkar translation services, reach out to our team today.