Africa is a hotspot of ethnic and linguistic diversity, with most of the continent’s countries, particularly those south of the Sahara Desert, home to dozens, if not hundreds, of diverse tribes, each with their own culture and language. Africa accounts for roughly 2,000 of the world’s 7,000-odd languages, and though many are endangered, many others are still spoken vigorously at the community level, despite the need for lingua francas to tie the population of a nation together. At the national level, lingua francas tend to be imported languages—English, French, Arabic, Portuguese—but indigenous languages play the role of local lingua francas all over Africa.
One such local lingua franca is Mende, which binds together disparate ethnic groups in southern Sierra Leone. It’s spoken natively by the Mende people, who form the ethnic majority in Sierra Leone’s Southern Province and Eastern Province, and is learned by other ethnic groups in the area to operate smoothly in southern Sierra Leonean society. Mende’s influence wanes in the north of the country, where the Temne people and their language, also called Temne, are more dominant, but its importance in southern Sierra Leone remains.
Even though Mende is an important regional lingua franca in Sierra Leone, it’s difficult to find translation companies that offer Mende translation services. That’s why we at TranslationServices.com have endeavored to build a professional Mende translation team—if you want a free quote, just ask!
A closer look at Mende, the lingua franca of southern Sierra Leone
While most speakers of Mende live in southern Sierra Leone, the Mende-speaking community does spill across national borders into Liberia and Guinea. It’s a member of the Mande language family, which itself is assumed (though not confirmed) to form a branch in the Niger–Congo macro family, which makes it related to other influential languages in West Africa, such as Maninka, Mandinka, Bambara (Bamanankan), Kpelle, and Susu. The language was previously written in the Mende Kikakui script, designed specially for the language, but today, the native has been largely abandoned in favor of the Latin alphabet.
As for grammar, Mende employs a subject-object-verb word order and makes use of reduplication to intensify adjectives and imply a continuous action in verbs. The Mende pronominal system is complicated, with gender distinctions in both the second and third person and a dual category to refer to two people. The pronouns can take different forms depending on the grammatical context, which furthers the complexity and makes Mende a difficult language to learn.
Proudly translating to and from Mende for clients of all backgrounds
If you want high-quality Mende translation services, you’ve come to the right place. We wanted to provide the people of Sierra Leone and the wider world with reliable Mende translation services, so we looked far and wide across Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea to locate the most skilled, experienced, and passionate Mende translators. Whether you need translation from Mende to English or from English to Mende, our team has your back.
Since our Mende translators draw on their diverse experience amassed from fruitful careers working on wide-ranging translation projects, we can confidently say that we can translate just about any type of content. If you need corporate translation, allow us to translate your employment contracts, white papers, business plans, ad copy, and more to help you capture the hearts of a customer base in Sierra Leone—or around the world. If you’re looking for academic translation, our academic specialists, who hail from a wide range of disciplines, can help you translate your Mende-language paper for publication in an international journal. Alternatively, they can translate your questionnaire into Mende for research purposes in Sierra Leone. When it comes to literary translation, we offer that, too—whether you want to translate Mende stories and literature into English for greater exposure or you’re looking to translate books or digital media into Mende to reach a new audience, our Mende translation team is here to help.
To get started with Mende translation services, just contact us today!