What language should you translate to localize in the Czech Republic?
What we know from our community
Czech is historically also known as Bohemian (lingua Bohemica). It is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of high mutual intelligibility. Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Greek, Latin, German and lately English.
Czechia is a homeland to the world-known lager beer formula and production process, which is allegedly the country largest contribution to the world’s culture, although the recipe was developed by a German brew master hired for work in Pilsen. Only slightly lesser of such worldly impact would be the inventions and discoveries of the effective-for-storage sugar cubes, eye-contact lenses and nylon stockings. Czechs also stand behind such discoveries and inventions as laws of genetics, lightning rod, blood groups, nanofiber, artificial veins, the so-called boiling glass (i.e. glass suitable for the production of both test tubes and teapots), and polarography, the invention of Josef Heyrovsky who was granted the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.
Others would include a ship’s propeller, gas street lights (spread wide across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the system in Prague actually still working today). Tomas Bata from East Bohemia did to shoes what Ford did to cars – introduced factory mass production to radically cheapen manufacturing costs and made shoes affordable ‘for everyone’ (which was not a norm in the early 1920’s, especially in rural Central Europe). And Karel Capek, a world-known writer of the Modern Age in the 1st half of 20th century, created the word ‘robot’ which has been used world-wide ever since he’d introduced it in his R.U.R. theatre play in 1920 and will be used even more frequently in the time to come.
Prague, the country’s capital city of approx. 1 million people, would for centuries be one of European’s highest acclaimed centers of knowledge, education, religious reformation, and culture. The Prague Castle is allegedly the world’s largest still inhabited castle, larger than England’s Windsor.
Czech (81.2%), Moravian (12.9%), Slovakian (1.9%), Polish (0.6%), German (0.5%), Silesiana (0.4%), Romany (0.3%), Hungarian (0.2%), other (2.0%)
What the top 150 best localized websites in the world do in Czech Republic
(Top 150 websites listed in the Global by Design ranking – published annually by Byte Level Research, this report provides a list of globally localized websites, showcasing best practices and emerging trends in their globalization)
89/150 localize by translating into Czech
1/150 localizes by translating into both Czech and Czech Sign Language
1/150 localizes by translating into both Czech and French
1/150 localizes by translating into both Czech and Slovakian
1/150 localizes by translating into both Czech and Russian
1/150 localizes by translating into Czech, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Arabic and Dutch
1/150 localizes by translating into Spanish, German, Italian, French and Simplified Chinese
1/150 localizes by translating into Spanish, German, French, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian and Portuguese
1/150 localizes by translating into Spanish, German, Italian, French, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian and Portuguese
1/150 localizes by translating into Spanish, German, Italian, French, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian