Croatian Translation Services

Where Croatian is spoken and where your translation is accepted

Croatian is the official language of Croatia, one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and, since 2013, an official language of the European Union. It is also a recognized minority language in Serbia, Montenegro, Austria, Hungary and Italy, and it has more than 5 million speakers. Emigration took Croatian to the United States, Canada, Chile, Argentina and Australia, and later to Germany and Austria, where many families still need Croatian records. The destination decides the type of translation.

Croatian translation services for Croatia, Bosnia and the diaspora

Croatian is close to Serbian and Bosnian, and speakers of the three understand each other, but each has its own standard, and documents from Croatia follow their own formats. A good translation follows the language of the original, keeps every letter of the names and reads naturally to whoever receives it.

• Letters: Croatian uses a Latin alphabet of 30 letters, with č, ć, dž, đ, lj, nj, š and ž, and č and ć are different letters. American documents often drop the marks, so Kovačević becomes Kovacevic. The translation keeps every name exactly as in the original, so tell us the form used in your US documents when you order.
• Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian: bread is kruh in Croatian and hleb in Serbian, a train is vlak in Croatian and voz in Serbian, and a thousand is tisuća in Croatian and hiljada in Serbian. Croatian is written only in the Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic, and documents from Bosnia and Herzegovina can come in any of the three languages.
• Names: many surnames end in -ić, and a surname does not change with gender, so Ivan Horvat and Ana Horvat share the same form. In running text names change their ending with grammatical case, so Ivan Horvat can appear as Ivana Horvata, and the translation keeps the name as it is written in the identity fields of the original.
• Dates and numbers: the months have their own Slavic names, so listopad is October and prosinac is December, and dates use periods, so 3. listopada 2026. is October 3, 2026. Decimals use a comma and thousands a period, so 1.500,00 is one thousand five hundred.
• Documents from Croatia: the birth extract (izvadak iz matice rođenih), the marriage extract (izvadak iz matice vjenčanih), the certificate of citizenship (domovnica) and the ID card (osobna iskaznica), which carries the personal identification number (OIB). The translation reproduces every stamp, seal and note.