Afrikaans Translation

World Translation Center can provide professional Afrikaans translation services for English to Afrikaans and Afrikaans to English. We can also translate Afrikaans to and from over 130 other languages, including all the principal languages of Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East and a wide range of African languages, at competitive prices.

Our Afrikaans specialists will be able to provide translation for virtually any project you might have, including marketing materials, technical, financial, legal and medical documents, websites and software. Our skilled project managers will match your project with a translator team best suited for the area of expertise needed. Every linguist works exclusively in his or her own mother tongue and within his or her area of expertise guaranteeing not only quality translation, but proper localization as well. After each document is translated, it will be edited and proofread by another professional translator to assure maximum quality.

We also make available transcription, video recording and subtitling services. In the event that you need to have an existing video dubbed, a commercial narrated or a telephone system recorded, our native Afrikaans speakers are available to provide high quality voiceover services.

We pride ourselves in delivering high quality cost-effective services, whether your project is small or large, simple or highly complex.

African lion

African flour with bird

Afrikaans Information

Afrikaans is derived from Dutch and classified as Low Franconian West Germanic. It is mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers living in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Zambia.

Afrikaans Language Facts

There are numerous Afrikaans speakers in the United Kingdom, with other substantial communities found in Brussels, Amsterdam, Perth, Mount Isa, Toronto and Auckland. It is the primary language used by two related ethnic groups in South Africa: the Afrikaners and the Coloureds or kleurlinge or bruinmense (including Basters, Cape Malays and Griqua).

Afrikaans developed among the Dutch speaking Protestant settlers, and the indentured or slave workforce of the Cape area in southwestern South Africa, an area that was established by the Dutch East India Company between 1652 and 1705. A relative majority of these first settlers were from the United Provinces (now Netherlands), though there were also many from Germany, a considerable number from France, and some from Norway, Portugal, Scotland, and various other countries. The indentured workers and slaves were Asians, Malays, Malagasy in addition to the indigenous Khoi and Bushmen.

The Afrikaans School has long seen Afrikaans as a natural development from the South-Hollandic Dutch dialect. Because of the absence of historical indication of the development of the dialect (language), some have implied Afrikaans to be a creolization of conceptual Dutch. However, this theory is rather implausible since it implies that a language systematically developed out of a vocabulary. Furthermore, this theory would fail to explain the systematic process of simplification from dialectical 17th century Dutch to Afrikaans, its geographically widespread and cohesive nature, and also the persistent structural similarities between Afrikaans and other regional Franconic dialects including West Flemish and Zeelandic. This indicates rather a linear, though isolated, linguistic path.

Afrikaans and Dutch are largely mutually intelligible.

Writing Afrikaans

Afrikaans also remains akin to other West-Germanic languages (except English) in that it remains a V2 language (verb second), which features verb final structures in subordinate clauses, just like Dutch and German.

Afrikaans, like Dutch, uses the Latin font.

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