An Accent on Accuracy

The highest quality translations, brisk turnaround schedules, competitive rates, and sharing of our knowledge, are all requisites for ALT‘s success. The complete and accurate translation of your company’s communications is vital to your success. That’s why ALT is obsessed with providing the best translators for YOUR project. High-quality translations are the product of a highly talented and experienced translation team with expertise in your industry. ALT puts all the pieces together to make it happen.

Why choose us for English to Dutch or Dutch to English Translation?

Advanced Language Translation’s Professional Dutch translation services utilize only native speakers to ensure quality and precision translations for your target audience. With Dutch in particular, a deep understanding of Dutch culture is needed for translation to be successful. When doing business in a Dutch-speaking country, professional human translation is a must. Do not expect to close a business deal or impress your clients with spotty software translation. Only through human translation, edited and customized to your target audience, can your meaning be honestly conveyed and your audience not be offended.

We are proud of our excellent reputation for reliable and high quality Dutch to English and English to Dutch translation services. We have assembled teams of translators from around the world, with an array of skills and specialties and can custom fit the knowledge and strengths of our teams to your specific projects and to your specific Dutch-speaking market. To demonstrate our commitment to quality and our dedication to our clients, we offer free consultations and provide an industry leading 180-day warranty on translation!

We provide quick and easy custom quotes for your Dutch translation and localization needs.

Need to get the “Gist” of Dutch?

Although professional translation is highly recommended for any business, legal or sincere correspondence in Dutch, sometimes it may be ok to use machine translation (via software or the internet) to get the gist of an e-mail or web page. By no means is machine translation an acceptable substitute for professional translation—the technology is not there yet. But it is great for quickly getting the general idea of an article, e-mail, or web site.

Interesting Facts about the Dutch Language

Netherlands and the northern half of Belgium. Dutch is also spoken in the Caribbean and in South America as it is one of the official languages of Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles and it is the official language of Suriname. The Dutch language is also known as Nederlands and Hollands.

For the most part, Dutch dialects from different regions and countries are mutually comprehensible, but significant divergences may exist, especially in vocabulary and pronunciation.

In the US, there are a little more than 150,000 speakers of Dutch. Jersey Dutch, a language spoken in the late 1600s and up until the early 20th century by a community of Dutch colonists and their descendents in northern New Jersey, is a highly divergent form of Dutch.

History of the Dutch Language

Dutch language belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. More specifically, Dutch is a West Germanic language, as are German, English and Frisian.

A group of Germanic dialects spoken in the Netherlands region during AD 700 is considered to be the foundation of modern day Dutch. These dialects were of Low Frankian origin and came to be known collectively as Old Low Franconian. The language began to be standardized during the Middle Ages. During this period, standardization drew mainly from the dialects of Flanders and Brabant due to the political and cultural importance of the areas in which they were spoken. A drive towards even greater standardization began in the 16th century, this time based on the dialect of Antwerp. Another important milestone in standardization was the publication of the first major Dutch translation of the Bible, which was written for universal intelligibility amongst all Dutch speakers.

Written Language

Dutch utilizes the Latin alphabet. But unlike English, there are 27 letters (IJ is the ‘extra’ letter). Diacritics include the acute accent (á,é,í,ó,ú), grave accent (à, è, ì, ò, ù) and diaeresis (ä, ë, ï, ö, ü).

The Dutch language is overseen by the Nederlandse Taalunie (NTU, “Dutch Language Union”), a bi-governmental organization first established in 1980 by the Netherlands and Belgium. The organization seeks to promote relations between Dutch-speaking countries and to create a Dutch standard, but does not regulate the language.

Dutch Language Statistics

• More than 21 million people speak Dutch.
• Dutch is present on 4 continents and ranks somewhere between 30th– 40th place as the world’s most widely spoken language.
• Among others, dialects include: Brabantian, Limburgish, and Zealandic.
• Afrikaans and many different Dutch-based Creole languages are derived from Dutch.

Translation / Localization Issues with Dutch

Advanced Language Translation has extensive experience with commercial and technical translations from English to Dutch and from Dutch into English. We have also amassed years of experience in typesetting Dutch content. Here are some of the common issues with English to Dutch translation that we have learned:

• As there are so many significant differences between Dutch spoken in various countries (and even in different regions of the same country), it is extremely important to take these differences into account when translating into Dutch. Due to this fact, Advanced Language Translation carefully selects the translation/localization team for your target market, taking into account not only the team’s subject matter expertise, but also their dialect and locale knowledge.
• Texts usually expand by about 10% when translated from English into Dutch. It is  extremely important to take this into account in the document authoring stage. For example, buttons on a web site should allow for this expansion.
• Dutch is a Latin 1 language and typesetting of Dutch texts does not pose any major technical difficulties, but hyphenation can be an issue.
• As with any other language, having taken a couple years of Dutch or being able to speak Dutch, does not necessarily make one a translator. Translation requires more skills than just good command of source and target languages.

Dutch Language Vital Information

Speaking Population: Approximately 21 million
Where Spoken: Aruba, Belgium, France, Germany, Indonesia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Suriname
Writing Systems: Latin 1
Code Pages:
ANSI - 1252
Mac - 10000
Windows – Western European
Unicode Supported: Yes
Common Phrases: (phonetic pronunciations in parentheses)
Dutch: nederlands (NAY-der-londs)
Hello: hallo (HA-lo)
Good-bye: dag (dahkh)
Please: alstublieft (AUS-tyou-bleeft)
Thank you: dank u wel (DANK you vel)
Yes: ja (ya)
No: nee (nah)
English: engels (ehng-uhls)