Canada is a huge nation. Spanning almost 10 million square kilometers, it’s second only to Russia in geographical size, even if the Canadian population only hovers around 40 million. With its massive size, it’s no surprise that the land encompassing modern-day Canada was home to countless ethnolinguistic groups for millennia before the arrival of European colonizers, with different language families dominating from coast to coast. Amerindian languages are severely overlooked today, with many people unaware that they’re still spoken by millions. Though the indigenous languages of Latin America are typically bigger, Canada still has languages like Ojibwe, with more than 50,000 speakers.
Ojibwe is more than just one language—in fact, it may be better to think of it as a cluster of closely related languages that stretch across a dialect continuum. The dialects are generally mutually intelligible, and since Ojibwe doesn’t have a single standardized orthography or a prestige dialect, most Ojibwe speakers are exposed to various Ojibwe dialects. One of them is Saulteaux, and with 10,000 speakers, it constitutes one of the biggest variants of Ojibwe. Sadly, though, translation coverage of Saulteaux (and other Ojibwe dialects) remains scarce—so we here at TranslationServices.com decided to make our own dedicated Saulteaux translation team.
We’re always available to provide free quotes for our Saulteaux translation services, so why not reach out and ask for one?
Zooming in on the Saulteaux dialect of Ojibwe
Saulteaux is one of the westernmost variants of Ojibwe, with most speakers residing in the Canadian Prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The dialect is known by many names, with some calling it Western Ojibwa or Plains Ojibwa, and others yet using its native name, Nakawēmowin. Saulteaux is often written in the Latin alphabet, like most Amerindian languages, but it also appears in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, a writing system designed for the indigenous languages of Canada.
As a member of the Algonquian language family, which stretches across large parts of eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, Saulteaux is far more grammatically complex than the average English speaker could possibly understand. So thorough is Saulteaux’s inflectional morphology, in fact, that the word order is generally free, as the grammatical relationships are already encoded through inflection. The most common word order is verb-object-subject, although the subject rarely appears independently. Like many other Amerindian languages, Saulteaux also draws a strict grammatical distinction between animate and animate nouns, using different grammatical patterns for the two.
Take advantage of our dedicated Saulteaux translation services.
Most translation agencies don’t even offer translation services for Ojibwe, let alone specific dialects of the expansive Canadian indigenous language. But we understand the cultural value of Saulteaux, which pushed us to scour Manitoba and Saskatchewan for the most skilled and experienced Saulteaux translators we could find. We made sure to hire native speakers of Saulteaux who truly love their language and are passionate about translating it, whether it’s translating culturally important texts and stories from Saulteaux to English to promote appreciation of Saulteaux culture or translating content from English to Saulteaux to increase the body of writing in the language and give it more legitimacy.
Since there are only around 10,000 speakers of Saulteaux, it’s simply not possible for us to cater to every niche—but we do the best we can given the confines of Saulteaux’s small speaker base. With translators specializing in different domains—business, academia, literature, and beyond—we’re able to accommodate the translation needs of diverse clients from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and elsewhere in Canada and the world, no matter why they’re looking for Saulteaux translation services. In fact, with subject-matter experts in different fields, we can even handle technical jargon in certain disciplines, so just ask whether we can cater to your specialty!
Promoting the Saulteaux dialect of Ojibwe through quality translation services is important to us. Let’s get started on your project today—it just takes a quick message!