Bulgarian translation services

Bulgarian translation services Diskusija offers

Diskusija provides professional Bulgarian translation services.

Thanks to our regional expertise and fine-tuned project and quality management processes, we’re able to guarantee that we’ll find the best solution for your Bulgarian translation needs. Our hand-picked Bulgarian translators have a deep understanding of their various areas of specialization and are qualified experts in the languages they translate between.

Our Bulgarian translation services primarily include the following language pairs:

English to Bulgarian
German to Bulgarian
French to Bulgarian

The above is just an indication of our most frequent projects involving Bulgarian, so if you’re in need of a different combination, contact us to see if we can provide the Bosnian translation you need!

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About the Bulgarian language

The Bulgarian language is a south-eastern Slavic language, which is spoken mainly in Bulgaria as the official language. There are approximately 8.5-9 million fluent speakers around the world, 7.7 million of whom are in Bulgaria.

It is one of the official languages of the European Union, following Bulgaria’s accession to the EU in 2007. Bulgarian is also spoken in Albania, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Bulgarian is fairly closely related to Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Slovenian and is mutually intelligible with Macedonian.

Indeed, there have been disputes related to this similarity. In the past, Bulgarian linguists tended to consider Macedonian as a dialect of the Bulgarian language, rather than an autonomous language. Macedonian linguists believed the opposite. But the majority of scholars outside the Balkan region consider these two languages to be separate.

Modern language: alphabet, vocabulary, spelling, grammar

Present-day written Bulgarian language was standardised on the basis of the vernacular Bulgarian spoken after Bulgaria became independent in 1878. Today, Bulgarian can be classified into two major dialect groups, eastern and western, each divided into north-south subgroups.

Since 1945, Bulgarian has used the Cyrillic alphabet with 30 letters. Most letters stand for just one specific sound. However, there are three letters (щ (sht), ю (yu), and я (ya)) which represent a combination of sounds and there are two sounds that do not correspond to separate letters but are a combination of two: дж (/dʒ/) and дз (/dz/). The letter ь marks the softening of any consonant that comes before it.

Many Turkish words were adopted into Bulgarian during the long period of Ottoman rule. Words have also been borrowed from Latin, Greek, Russian, French, Italian, and German and increasingly from English.

There are three genders in Bulgarian: masculine, feminine and neuter. The gender of a noun can be determined from its ending. Nouns also have a singular and plural form. Adjectives and adjectival pronouns agree with nouns in number and gender. Nouns and adjectives also have definiteness that is expressed by the definite article which is fixed to the ending of the noun.

Cases exist only for personal pronouns with nominative, accusative, dative and vocative forms. Vestiges are present in the masculine personal interrogative pronoun кой (“who”) and in a number of phraseological units and sayings.

Bulgarian verbs are the most complicated part of Bulgarian grammar as they vary in person, number, sometimes gender, lexical aspect, tense, and mood.

History of the Bulgarian language

Bulgarian was the first Slavic language to be written: it first appeared in writing during the 9th century in the Glagolitic alphabet that was gradually replaced by an early version of the Cyrillic alphabet over the following centuries.

It was Christianity which dramatically influenced the development of the Old Bulgarian language (which is also known as Old Church Slavonic) in the 9-11th centuries.

In order to facilitate the spread of Christianity in the region, Saints Cyril and Methodius designed an alphabet (Glagolitic alphabet) which was used by missionaries to translate parts of the Old and New Testament into Old Church Slavonic.

The first mention of the language as the “Bulgarian language” instead of the “Slavonic language” appeared in the work of the Greek clergy of the Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ohrid in the 11th century.

During the middle Bulgarian period (12th to 16th century) that began with Bulgaria’s subjugation by the Byzantine Empire, a number of linguistic changes occurred which came to set Bulgarian apart as a distinct language. The loss of cases in the noun and the development of a definite article were major changes in particular.

Modern Bulgarian dates from the 16th century onwards, undergoing general grammar and syntax changes in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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