Hungarian names – how do we translate them?
In Hungary, Kovacs is the second most common surname, but its etymology is a bit unclear. Kovács means blacksmith or blacksmith in Hungarian, but it is originally found in Slavonic as Kovaè. Variations of the same surname are: Kovach (Carpatho-Russian), Kowal (Poland) and Koval (Ukraine).
The policy in Hungary is for everything to be translated into the official language of the country. The equivalent of the surname Kovács in English is Smith, but in translated texts the original name is used as it appears in the source language.
Hungarian is part of the chain of languages that stretched 7000-10000 years ago along the Ural Mountains. The Hungarian language is said to be related to Finnish, but it must be taken into account that the Hungarian-speaking population was at one end of the mountain range, and the Finnish people at the other. What do the two have in common today? For example, a rather elaborate system of grammatical cases. Depending on what the speaker wants to express, a prefix or suffix is added to the base word. Such a linguistic process leads to the creation of very long words such as “megszentségéténgíthethetelnéséges” which translates to “a thing that is almost impossible to desacralize”. The basic word in this case is “szent”, which means divine, sacred, holy.
The Valley Center offices are located in the western part of Romania, close to the border with Hungary, and thus Hungarian is one of the main languages we translate into, in combination with Romanian.
We frequently translate medical documents issued in Hungary such as hospital discharge tickets, treatment plans, analysis reports, referrals, operative descriptions, CT/PET reports.
We have over 10 years of experience in translating documents to/from Hungarian. We can translate personal documents such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, diplomas, transcripts, contracts, powers of attorney, certificates, records. For companies we frequently translate contracts, technical documents, user manuals, balance sheets and balance sheets, websites and applications.