Hungarian Translation Services

Where Hungarian is spoken and where your translation is accepted

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and, since Hungary joined the European Union on May 1, 2004, an official language of the Union. It is also spoken by large Hungarian communities in Romania, mostly in Transylvania, and in Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine and Austria, and it is a regional official language in the Serbian province of Vojvodina and in parts of Slovenia. It has more than 12 million speakers. Emigration took Hungarian to the United States and Canada, above all after 1956, and many families still need their Hungarian records translated. The destination decides the type of translation.

Hungarian translation services: names, accents and the mother’s name

Hungarian is not related to the languages around it: it is a Uralic language, with its own grammar, its own name order and documents in formats of their own. A good translation reads the original as Hungarian, writes every name the way the passport does and keeps every number of the original.

• Alphabet and accents: the Hungarian alphabet has 44 letters, with combinations that count as one letter, such as cs, gy, ny, sz and zs, and long vowels marked by an accent, including the double accents of ő and ű. The accent changes the word, so kerek is round and kerék is a wheel, and in a name Szőke is not Szoke. The machine-readable line of a passport drops the accents, so tell us the form used in your US documents when you order.
• Name order: in Hungarian the family name comes first, so Nagy István is István Nagy in English. A married woman may take her husband’s name with the ending -né, so Nagyné Kovács Anna is Anna, born Kovács, wife of a man named Nagy. The translation puts each part in its own field, so forms in the United States do not swap the first name and the last name.
• The mother’s name: Hungarian certificates and ID cards record the birth name of the mother (anyja neve), and the translation keeps it as the mother’s maiden name. Hungarian also has a single pronoun, ő, for he and she, so the translation takes the sex of each person from the document itself.
• Dates and numbers: dates are written year, month and day, so 2026. október 3. or 2026.10.03. is October 3, 2026, and the months are written in lowercase. Decimals use a comma and thousands a space, so 1 500,00 is one thousand five hundred.
• Documents from Hungary: the birth certificate (születési anyakönyvi kivonat), the marriage certificate (házassági anyakönyvi kivonat), the ID card (személyi igazolvány), the address card (lakcímkártya), the certificate of good conduct (erkölcsi bizonyítvány) and the diploma (oklevél) with its record of subjects and grades. Many records carry the personal identification number (személyi azonosító), with 11 digits that include the date of birth. The translation reproduces every stamp, seal and note.