Editing, translation and proofreading of texts in Kazakh language

What difficulties does a translator face when working with the Kazakh language?

• The language does not yet have a clear base of terms. The same linguistic concepts can be expressed by different terms, or several semantic loads are attached to one term. There are few highly specialized dictionaries, so the translator is forced to invent professionalisms, which leads to difficulties in reverse translation by another specialist.
• It is difficult to achieve economy of language means, since our language has many abbreviations and polysemantic words. We have a lot of long sayings that are translated into a couple of simple words in Kazakh.

However, specialists bypass all these difficulties, since the task of any translation is to convey the meaning of the translated text, and not to organize a literal translation.

The Kazakh language belongs to the group of Turkic languages and has all the features of this group. The language has no dialects, but there are three dialects that differ from each other only in pronunciation. The literary language is based on the northeastern dialect. This is an agglutinative language. There is no category of gender here, but the category of belonging appears. There is no agreement between the adjective and the noun. Each sentence is constructed according to one strict template: subject - object - predicate.

Our languages have significant differences in morphological structure. Kazakhs have no prepositions, conjunctions are very rare, but cases and postpositions are used. There are no prefixes in the language. The root of the word always remains unchanged, and new words are formed using affixes that have a word-forming function. The language has many homonyms, for example, the word "bet" has the following meanings: face, cheek, surface.

The alphabet has 42 letters, among them letters that reflect the specifics of pronunciation: "ә, і, ы, е, ү, ұ, ғ, қ, ң, һ". Letters are taken from the Russian language that denote sounds that are present only in foreign words: "v, f, c, ch, b, ъ, e, e." According to the latest decree of the President of Kazakhstan, Kazakh linguists are working on translating the Cyrillic alphabet into Latin letters. The deadline for the transition to the Latin alphabet has not yet been determined, but the process has begun.