Russian isn’t the only language spoken in Russia—far from it. Dozens of minority languages are scattered across the vast territory of Russia, most of which are from completely different language families. While most people outside of Russia have never heard of the majority of these languages, anyone who knows anything about minority languages in Russia likely knows Tatar, the co-official language of Russia’s highly populated Republic of Tatarstan.
Tatar is spoken by more than 7 million people, which is more than double the population of Tatarstan. It enjoys co-official language status in the republic and is taught in Tatarstan schools, often as the sole language of instruction in rural areas. Nonetheless, Tatar is considered a “potentially endangered language,” since Russian is so much bigger and more prestigious, and Tatars require it to communicate with Russians from other parts of the country. Thus, Tatar translation services, especially those that work with English instead of Russian, are limited. TranslationServices.com, however, is proud to step in and offer high-quality translation services between Tatar and English.
We can provide free quotes for our Tatar translation services to anyone who messages us and asks for one.
Discovering one of Russia’s most prominent minority languages: Tatar
Since Tatar is generally written in the Cyrillic alphabet, to the untrained eye, it may look just like Russian. However, Tatar hails from an entirely different language family—the Turkic family—and features an entirely different grammatical structure from Russian. Most Tatar speakers are found in Russia, particularly in Tatarstan and neighboring Russian federal subjects like Bashkortostan, but also in countries bordering Russia, like Kazakhstan, Georgia, Finland, and Latvia. Some ethnic Russians also speak Tatar.
Tatar has an agglutinative structure, meaning that it appends affixes to root words to express grammatical ideas. The language features six noun cases, whose suffixes change depending on the sounds in the root word in a phenomenon called vowel harmony. There is no gender distinction in the third-person singular pronoun in Tatar, differentiating the language from both English and Russian. Tatar verbs are just as complex as the nouns, since they also undergo conjugation for a range of tenses and aspects, also with vowel harmony. The Tatar tense system includes two separate future and past tenses that denote the respective level of certainty that the action will happen or has happened.
Our Tatar translators love their language and are passionate about translating it, no matter what grammatical challenges it presents.
We want to translate to and from Tatar for you.
Do you want translation services from Tatar to English or from English to Tatar? Fortunately, we’re equipped to provide both. Why not translate historical documents written in Tatar—even if they’re in the historical Arabic or Latin scripts? Or how about translating Tatar literature into English to share with those who don’t speak the language? Our translators would be happy to help. More suggestions include translating business content into Tatar to cater to a Tatar-speaking customer base, translating educational materials into Tatar so Tatar-speaking children can learn in their own language, and translating English books, games, websites, apps, and more into Tatar so that Tatar speakers can use their language in more domains and learners can easily pick up the language.
Reach out to us today to tell us what you’re envisioning for your Tatar translation project.