Over the years, ITC has developed a strong network of translators whose native language is Romanian. These linguists have passed several rounds of tests and are evaluated regularly. In addition, ITC project managers have drawn up language guides to help translators follow the specific rules that apply to Romanian.
Romanian is the only Romance language in the Eastern part of Europe. The region was inhabited by Dacians, who are believed to have spoken a Tracian language. However, during the rule of the Roman emperor Traian, the territory was conquered by the Romans who stayed for some time after the conquest and thus, the Romanian language was born.
After their departure, the language was influenced by the Slavs, who came to the area in the seventh century. Some of the words that have been borrowed from the Slavonic language became part of the basic Romanian vocabulary (words depicting notions such as love, work, friend, live, etc.). Starting with the 18th century, the language was influenced by Turkish and Greek. The Turkish influences were mostly limited to the administrative and diplomatic vocabulary and most of these words disappeared from the language during later times.
The oldest document written in Romanian is a letter dating from 1521. It was written with Cyrillic letters, which were in use up until the 19th century, when the modern era of Romanian starts and when the Cyrillic alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet. In the 19th century, the language was enriched with massive loans from other Romance languages (mostly from French). This contributed to the increase of the Latin influence on the Romanian language.
Romanian sentence structure is Subject-Verb-Object, which is also common to English and other Romance languages. Unlike English however, the subject may be omitted, as it can be inferred from the verb form or from the use of the subject in a sentence in the past or future tense.
As with other Romance languages, nouns in Romanian have gender. However, Romanian does not have two genders, but three: masculine, feminine and neuter. The neuter is a combination of the masculine and feminine genders and it comprises nouns that are masculine in the singular form, but feminine in the plural form. Romanian has a polite second person pronoun, dumneavoastră, which is used similarly to the French vous with the plural form of the verb. Also, there is a formal way of speaking about a third person – dumnealui (masculine singular), dumneaei (feminine singular), and dumnealor (plural form). Romanian pronunciation is very phonetic and the sounds are very similar to the ones in other Romance languages. The letters are almost always pronounced the same, regardless of their surrounding environment. There are no accents in Romanian, but there are five special characters that appear after equivalent in the alphabet: ă, â, î, ș, ț.
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