All across Kenya, you’ll find a plethora of indigenous languages spoken vigorously by their respective communities, even if they’re generally unknown to the outside world. Overshadowed by the national lingua francas of Swahili and English, the minority languages of Kenya face struggles and may even be endangered, as these bigger, more prestigious languages encroach on the lives and cultures of minority peoples. But at home, these languages—such as Taita—remain vibrant.
Roughly 370,000 people in Kenya use Taita as their primary means of communication, but the Taita language is mostly confined to a particular region of the country, which limits the influence it can exert. Usage of the language in the region is rich and vibrant, but speakers must generally learn Swahili and English to communicate with outsiders. That’s why most translation companies gloss over the minority tongue and just offer Swahili translation services instead, but we at TranslationServices.com are proud to bring our translation expertise to the Taita-speaking world.
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Learning more about the dialect-rich Taita language
Taita is indigenous to the Taita Hills, a rich, fertile mountain range named after the Taita people who inhabit it. Administratively, Taita Hills falls within the Taita-Taveta County of southeastern Kenya. The Taita people speak a number of distinct dialects, the primary ones being Daw’ida, Kasigau, and Sagala. The nearby Taveta language is so closely related that a linguist once mistook it for Taita’s Daw’ida dialect—and similarly, the Sagala dialect is so distinct that some linguists believe it should be classified as a separate language.
Though Taita is a Bantu language, close proximity to Cushitic peoples has led to significant numbers of Cushitic loanwords being absorbed into the Daw’ida and Sagala dialects of Taita. The language has also adopted loanwords from nearby Bantu languages of Chaga, Mijikenda, and Pare, as well as the Nilotic language of Maasai. But grammatically, Taita exhibits the typical Bantu traits, particularly the expansive noun class system that encompasses more than a dozen classes. Since nouns, adjectives, verbs, demonstratives, and possessives are all marked with prefixes based on the class of a noun, the noun class system can make Taita (and other Bantu languages) remarkably complex—so it’s worth it to invest in the native-speaking translators on our Taita team.
We’re dedicated to quality and flexibility in our Taita translation services.
When you entrust your Taita translation project to us, we want you to know your documents are in good hands—no matter what the content is or what special requests you may have. If you require translation services for a particular Taita dialect, such as Daw’ida, Sagala, or Kasigau, just let us know—we’ve hired specialists to represent all three major dialects. We can also match you to the right translator based on whether you’re looking for translation to Taita or from Taita, as we work in both directions.
But our flexibility goes beyond dialect and translation direction—our multifaceted translation team contains experts in various types of translation specializations. Academic clients, for example, can lean on our academic translation team for pinpoint translations of their research surveys, academic papers, and more, for any field. If your document contains a lot of technical vocabulary, just let us know, and we’ll match you with a Taita translator who knows your discipline. If instead you’re eying business translation, either for internal documents like business plans and financial reports or customer-facing materials like ad copy, our Taita business translators would be thrilled to offer their expertise. And for the creatives among our clientele, our literary translators and localization specialists are here to help prepare your book, poetry, short stories, videos, movies, games, apps, and more for a new audience with meticulous Taita translation.
Why not get started with Taita translation services today? Place an order now!