Why English to Romanian is harder than it looks
Romanian is a Romance language with Slavic neighbours. The grammar is Latin, much of the everyday vocabulary is Latin, and a layer of Slavic borrowings sits on top. A translator that treats it as “like Italian” gets the common words right and the borrowed ones wrong.
The article attaches to the end of the noun. Apartament becomes apartamentul for “the apartment,” rather than taking a separate word in front. English’s “the” has nowhere to go except onto the end of the Romanian word, which changes its shape.
Nouns have three genders, including neuter. Romanian keeps a neuter that behaves as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This catches out translators trained mainly on French, Spanish or Italian, where no such class exists.
La mulți ani covers several English wishes. It works for birthdays, name days and the new year alike, so “happy birthday” translated back can be narrower than what the Romanian actually said. The set phrase is usually the right translation rather than the literal one.
Written by Hardik Vegad, Co-founder, Translatify. Last updated .
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