Why is translation difficult from English to Thai? As businesses look to grow in the global market, Thailand is now one of the favored markets to start processes in. As a part of the ASEAN community and being one of the top economies in Southern Asia, Thailand has opened its doors to a lot of global businesses in recent years. However, as with any new market entry, there are always difficulties and challenges that businesses face. One such challenge is communication and language barrier. Even though English is broadly spoken in Thailand, there are still many people who do not understand or speak it, at a business level. This barrier leads us to questions such as Google Translate is an accurate tool, how to translate Thai language, etc. Let us explore the language to understand more about it.
The Thai Language Thai is one of the most spoken of over 60 languages of Thailand by both overall and native speakers. Over half of its vocabulary is borrowed or derived from Sanskrit, Pali, Old Khmer, and Mon. It is an analytic and tonal language. Thai has a system of relational markers and a complex orthography. This written system is diverse from other scripts because it uses a combination of vowels and consonants to represent different sounds. The Thai alphabet contains 44 letters and each letter has its unique sound. Words are written minus any spaces between them, and there are no lower case or no upper letters.