Professional Translation agency for
Dutch translations

A total of around 28 million people worldwide have Dutch as their first language. Of those, around 17 million live in the Netherlands, 6 million in Belgium (Flanders) and about 600,000 in Suriname, which was a Dutch colony until 1975. Dutch also has the status of an official language in the Caribbean countries of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. It is one of the official languages of the European Union.

Translations into Dutch can reach people all over the world. Along with correct grammar and the right tone (more about that below), linguistic adaptation is also a quality criterion – probably less in everyday contexts, but more so in the business world. Technical terminology should (or must) therefore be reproduced precisely and correctly at all times in a translation. That holds true for everything from medical to legal translations. You should therefore always have your Dutch specialist translations completed by a native speaker with the necessary expertise in the area in question.

Dutch is a language of tone, in which the meaning of a word is affected not only by the sequence of sounds, but also by the level or progression of the tone. In other words: the same sequence of sounds stressed or intoned in different ways can have different meanings. For example, the word papa (without stress) means a potato masher in Dutch, but if you stress the first syllable it becomes papá and means dad. The tone also helps to indicate questions or mark the difference between a statement and a command.

In written communication, the tone of the Dutch language is rendered by punctuation and the choice of words and expressions. Question marks, for example, can appear at the end of a sentence even though that sentence does not begin with a question word. The intonation and emphasis of a sentence can by conveyed by using modal particles and adverbials. A professional translation takes account of these linguistic intricacies and translates both the content and its meaning precisely into or from Dutch. You should therefore always use a translation agency if you want to make sure that your message reaches its audience as it should.

Many people think that Dutch and Hollandic are the same thing. Strictly speaking, however, that is not the case. Hollandic is a variant of Dutch and is wrongly used as a synonym in some languages (German, for example). Hollandic is merely a dialect that is used in the Dutch province of Holland. Today, it is spoken and understood in all regions of the country.

Nevertheless, it sometimes irritates Dutch people if the two terms are confused or used incorrectly. You should therefore always make sure that your translations are into Dutch. Unless, of course, you want to target a more specific group of people, in northern or southern Holland, for example. In most cases, it is then worthwhile having the translation adapted to the regional and cultural linguistic usage. This is also referred to as localisation. If you would like to find out more: we have summarised the differences between translation and localisation in our guide.