Welcome to Indonesia—the second-most linguistically diverse country on the planet (number one, incidentally, is Indonesia’s next-door neighbor Papua New Guinea). Indonesian is the national lingua franca, learned by most residents for education, media, and communication with people from other regions, but only a small portion of the Indonesian population learns it as a first language. So, what languages do Indonesians speak as their mother tongue? More than 700—and one is Lampung.
With around 1.5 million native speakers, Lampung isn’t the biggest minority language in Indonesia, but it certainly isn’t the smallest, either. However, despite the relatively large number of speakers, the local government is concerned about the language becoming endangered as more and more people shift to Bahasa Indonesia. The government is taking active steps to safeguard Lampung’s future, including by teaching the native Lampung script in primary and secondary schools in the region. Access to high-quality translation services can also help—and that’s why we at TranslationServices.com are so pleased to present our new Lampung translation services.
If you send us a message, you can request a free quote for our Lampung translation services today!
Dissecting the Lampung language
It’s not hard to guess where Lampung is spoken—in Sumatra’s province of Lampung, of course. Additional native speakers can also be found in the neighboring province of South Sumatra. The language comes in three primary varieties: Lampung Api (also known as Pesisir), Lampung Nyo (also called Abung), and Komering. Komering is sometimes considered a separate language, with the Komering people generally seeing themselves as a distinct but closely related ethnic group.
Like most languages in Indonesia, Lampung belongs to the Austronesian family—more specifically, the Malayic branch. It features many of the same grammatical features you’ll find in Indonesian, such as a distinction between the first-person plural inclusive (“you, I, and maybe others”) and first-person plural exclusive (“I and other people but not you”), different sets of pronouns depending on the level of formality, and affixed versions of pronouns that can be added to nouns or verbs. Reduplication (repeating a word) is also common in Lampung, used to form plural nouns or intensify adjectives. Partial reduplication is used to soften an adjective. Needless to say, translating to and from Lampung can be tricky—which is why we’ve hired experienced native speakers.
We can cater our Lampung translation services to meet your needs.
If you’re looking for Lampung translation services, you’ve come to the right place—no matter what your project is. While most translation firms fail to offer services for minority languages like Lampung, we’ve gone out of our way to recruit skilled translators from all over Lampung and South Sumatra, finding passionate representatives of Lampung Api, Lampung Nyo, and Komering alike. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking to broadcast a Lampung-language message to the world or home in on a Lampung-speaking audience, either, since we offer translation both to and from Lampung.
We offer general Lampung translation services, but we also work with more specialized documents in a wide range of domains. Any academics among our clients can rely on our Lampung academic translation team for translation of their research surveys, interview transcripts, and more. The businesspeople in the crowd can work with our Lampung business translators to seamlessly target a customer base in southern Sumatra by translating their ads into Lampung—or internationalize their business by translating from Lampung to English. If you’re a creative who wants to spread their work further, our literary translators would love to assist you in translating your novels, poems, short stories, apps, websites, games, or other works to or from Lampung, taking special care to emulate your unique writing style in the translated text.
Whatever your Lampung translation needs may be, we’re happy to help. Send us a message today to place your first order!