Most translation services only work with the biggest, most profitable languages. If they venture into less orthodox languages, they still stick with highly established and prestigious languages with a healthy speaker base. Very few translation firms are willing to devote translation resources to endangered and minority languages, since they don’t offer the same return on investment. But here at TranslationServices.com, we’re passionate about linguistic diversity, which pushes us to offer translation services for endangered languages like Bima.
Bima is native to Indonesia, where more than 700 languages are spoken indigenously. As the world’s second-most linguistically diverse country, Indonesia requires a national lingua franca to facilitate interethnic communication, and Indonesian has been awarded this role. Thus, while the Bimanese people usually speak Bima as their first language and use it for communication in their local area, they also learn Indonesian to speak with others from the country. This puts Bima at risk of extinction, as speakers start abandoning Bima in favor of Indonesian. To help preserve this precious language, we’re doing what we do best: offering high-quality translation services, this time for Bima.
Message us today about a quote for our Bima translation services. Quotes are always free!
Want to know more about Bima?
Bima is spoken on Sumbawa Island, an island in southern Indonesia, as well as on the smaller nearby islands Banta, Sangeang, and Komodo. Bima is spoken on the eastern half of the island, with inhabitants of the western half speaking Sumbawarese. Historically, the Bimanese shared the eastern half of the island with the Tambora people, whose entire language and culture were wiped out with the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history. People usually use the Latin alphabet to write Bima, although the Lontara script was used in the past.
As a Malayo–Polynesian language, Bima shares a lot in common with other languages in Indonesia, including Indonesian. The pronoun system is extensive, with honorific forms for first- and second-person pronouns and a clusivity distinction in the first-person plural, denoting whether or not the listener is included. All pronouns have both a full form and a clitic form. Interestingly, the position of the clitic form in an intransitive sentence can indicate the tense—when it comes before the verb, it indicates the future, but when it’s placed after the verb, it denotes the past.
Flexible Bima translation services in either direction
If Bima sounds tricky to you, don’t worry—it’s not to our translators. Our team is staffed with native Bima-speaking translators who are committed to high-quality translations to and from their unique language. This allows us to cover all sorts of translation needs, even for historical documents written in the Lontara script. We also have literary translation specialists on the team who can help translate Bima literature to share with the world or translate English-language books and poetry into flowing Bima prose. If you’re a researcher who’d like a questionnaire translated into Bima, just send it our way, or if you’re a language activist who wants digital content—such as websites, apps, or games—translated into Bima, let us handle it. Our translators are passionate about everything related to Bima translation.
Are you ready to start your Bima translation project? We are—so just get in touch with us with the details!