Czech translation services

Czech translation services Diskusija offers

Diskusija works in close relation with a selection of expert, native Czech linguists with experience across various industries to provide Czech translation services that suit your needs and those of your audience. We ensure high quality by adhering to ISO standards and procedures, which assure proper care for every project. Czech is one of the strategically selected languages in which we specialize due to our focus on the Baltic and Central and Eastern European region.

The Czech translation services we offer most frequently involve the following language pairs:

English to Czech
German to Czech
French to Czech

However, don't hesitate to contact us should you have any other language combination including Czech.

Do you have a Czech project?

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About the Czech Language

The Czech language (čeština in Czech) is a West Slavic language belonging to the Indo-European language family. There are around 12 million speakers, most of whom live in the Czech Republic. Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic and one of the official languages of the European Union.

Czech is mutually intelligible with the Slovak language and – to a lesser extent – with Polish.

The name “ceština” (Czech) is believed to be derived from the Slavic tribe of Czechs. The tribe inhabited Central Bohemia – the western part of today’s Czech Republic.

The Czech language was called the Bohemian language in English until the 19th century.

Modern language: alphabet, vocabulary, spelling, grammar

Today’s Czech language is written using the Latin based alphabet with additional letters modified with diacritic marks.

The phonology of Czech as well as of other Slovak languages can seem unusual and difficult to outsiders, as there are words that consist only of consonants, such as zmrzl (frozen solid) or vlk (a wolf).

The accent is placed on the first syllable in Czech – this makes it different from other Slavic languages (except for Slovak), where accent placement is free. Long words do have a secondary stress.

Czech verbs, nouns, adjectives may assume many forms – Czech is highly inflectional. There are seven cases for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numbers; verbs are conjugated. Czech verbs can have three tenses: present, past and future. In addition, verbs can be divided into perfect and imperfect aspects. These can be distinguished by changing the ending: dát (perfect) – dávat (imperfect), or prefix: psát (imperfect) – napsat (perfect).

There are three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, with masculine subdivided into animate and inanimate.

Distinct regional dialects of the Czech language exist throughout the country, but they are mutually intelligible.

History of the Czech language

As with other Slavic languages, the emergence of the Czech language was connected with the resettlement of Slavs throughout Eastern Europe in the 6th century AD. That was when the Slavic language separated into three main groups, consisting of East Slavic, South Slavic and West Slavic to which the Czech language along with Polish, Slovak languages belongs.

Until the 11th century, Old Church Slavonic was used as the written Czech language. But in the 11th century Latin replaced Old Church Slavonic.

The Czech language was suppressed until approximately the 14th century; it was seen as a peasant language not worthy of standardisation, or use in literature.

That changed when the religious reformer Jan Hus started developing uniform Czech language spelling. Hus’ work was continued through the 15th and 16th centuries by a Protestant sect known as the Unity of Brethren or Moravian Brethren. Thanks to their efforts, the Czech language was standardised and adopted as a language of literature.

Czech literature started to appear in the 13th century. The first printed book in Czech was published in 1468.

The Czech and Slovak languages are very similar. After gaining independence and creating Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Czech and Slovak languages were considered as two dialects of a single language. In the 1920 constitution of Czechoslovakia, the official language was named Czechoslovakian.

In 1993, as Czechoslovakia was separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Czech became the official language of the Czech Republic.

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