Professional Laotian Translation Services

World Translation Center offers professional Laotian translation services for English to Laotian and Laotian to English. We can also translate Laotian to and from over 150 other languages, including all the principal languages of Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East and a variety of African languages, at competitive rates.

Our Laotian experts have the ability 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 most appropriate for the area of expertise needed. Each individual linguist works exclusively in his or her own mother tongue and within his or her field of expertise guaranteeing not only quality translation, but proper localization at the same time. After each document is translated, it will be edited and proofread by a second professional translator to assure highest possible quality.

We also render transcription, video recording and subtitling services. Should you need to have an existing video dubbed, a commercial narrated or a telephone system recorded, our native Laotian speakers are available to provide you with expert voiceover services.

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

Laotian Information

Lao, a Thai-Kadai language spoken by approximately 15 million people in Laos and Thailand. It is closely related to Thai and speakers of Lao are able to understand spoken Thai without too many difficulties. Thai speakers find it more difficult to understand Lao due to lack of exposure to the language.

Language Facts

After the unification of the Lao principalities in the 14th century, the Lan Xang monarchs commissioned their scholars to create a new script to write the Lao language. The scholars probably modeled the alphabet on the Old Khmer script, which was based on Mon scripts. The modern Lao script retains many aspects of the appearance of the early Thai script, which is no longer present in modern-day Thai script.

- Syllables are based around consonants. Vowels are indicated with diacritics, which can appear above, below or around the consonant letters. When they occur on their own or at the beginning of a word, vowels are attached to the glottal stop symbol (the final letter in the third row of consonants).

- Lao is a tonal language with 6 tones. The tone of a syllable is determined by a combination of the class of consonant, the type of syllable (open or closed), the tone marker and the length of the vowel.

- For some consonants there are multiple letters. Originally they represented separate sounds, but over the years the distinction between those sounds was lost and the letters were used instead to indicate tones. Various official reforms of the Lao script have reduced the number of duplicate consonants.

Writing

Written Lao is based on the dialect of the Lao capital, Vientiene. There are no spaces between words. Spaces in a Lao text indicate the end of a clause or sentence. There is no official Latin transliteration system for Lao. In Laos, French-based systems are used and there is considerable variation in spelling, particularly of vowels. In Thailand, the Royal Thai General Transcription is used. Educated Lao people can also read written Thai.

Consonants are divided into three classes that help determine the tone of a syllable. The sounds represented by some consonants change when they are used at the end of a syllable. The consonants can all be used at the beginning of a syllable, but only some can be used at the end of a syllable.

An example of written Laotian text:

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