Hungarian

The Hungarian language has its roots in the Hungarian migration of the 9th century, from the Ural Mountains. This origin grants the language a distinct identity from other European languages, since it comes from the Uralic language family, while many other European languages are distinctly Indo-European in origin. This means that, while the language shares some similarities with languages like Finnish, it is not mutually intelligible with languages in the region.

The language has undergone much development throughout its history, especially through interactions with other languages and communities. However, even with linguistic modernization efforts through the 18th and 19th centuries, the tongue has retained a distinct identity, giving Hungarian a property of uniqueness in the region.

Languages are products of their circumstances, perhaps more than anything else. They form from specific contexts to describe specific phenomena, and many of these contexts are not super interchangeable either geographically or culturally. This means that different languages form to describe different ideas in different ways—ideas that might not exist at all in other languages, or not in the same way.

This is what makes translation so tricky. It’s not just finding the right words if they exist, it’s finding the way to express a concept in the target language with culturally relevant concepts and expressions. The ability to do this depends, largely, on a high level of cultural understanding. Without cultural understanding, it can be easy for translations to turn out silly, or even entirely in cohesive.