Denmark is a lot more than just Denmark. Although perhaps not common knowledge, Denmark has sovereignty over Greenland and the Faroe Islands, a small collection of islands situated roughly halfway between Iceland and the United Kingdom. Despite ultimately being ruled by Denmark, the Faroe Islands is an autonomously governed nation with a strong national identity, and part of that identity involves the Faroe Islands’ very own language, Faroese.
While Danish is taught in Faroese schools and may be used by the Faroese government in public relations, Faroese remains the national and primary language of the small island nation. There are about 72,000 native speakers of Faroese, around 53,000 of whom live in the Faroe Islands, most of the remainder residing in Denmark. Faroese has a long written tradition, having retained usage in ballads, folktales, and everyday life even after the Danish takeover in the 1300s. Today, Faroese is still the native language of nearly all Faroe Islanders. However, most translation companies overlook Faroese, given the obscurity of the Faroe Islands. Not us here at TranslationServices.com, though! We’ve developed our own Faroese translation team to deliver high-quality Faroese translation services.
We’d be happy to provide a free quote for our Faroese translation services to anyone who requests one!
What kind of language is Faroese, anyway?
If you’re thinking that Faroese is related to Danish, you’d be right—but they’re far from mutually intelligible. Faroese is a member of the Germanic subfamily of the expansive Indo–European language family, having ultimately evolved from Old Norse. Faroese is most closely related to Icelandic, and the two languages are relatively mutually intelligible in writing, although not in speech. Faroese is also one of only three languages in the world that uses the letter ð, the other two being Icelandic and Elfdalian (an endangered language of Sweden).
Faroese, like Icelandic, has retained much more of the grammatical complexity of Old Norse than its modern-day Scandinavian counterparts. The language features three genders and four cases, which trigger inflection not only in nouns themselves but also in the adjectives and demonstratives modifying them. Faroese verb conjugation can get tricky, too, because the language features many different paradigms for inflection: some verbs are “weak” and are conjugated via suffixes, while others are “strong” and undergo conjugation via vowel changes, with seven different classes of strong verbs.
We’re here to accommodate all your Faroese translation needs.
Even though Faroese conjugation charts can be confusing for learners, native speakers know it all by heart, and since our Faroese translation team is staffed by native speakers, translating between Faroese and English poses no problems to them. Our translators draw on their wealth of experience to provide translation services for a variety of needs, whether you need translation into Faroese or from Faroese. In addition to corporate and academic translation, we also cover specialty translation services. For example, we’d be happy to translate historical documents written in Faroese, including traditional literature that requires a particularly careful eye. For those seeking translation from English to Faroese, the same applies—we can even help you bring Faroese into the digital era through Faroese translations of English-language websites, apps, software, and games. This also helps fortify the language for the future!
Why not reach out to us today so we can discuss your Faroese translation needs?