Expert Afrikaans Translation Services

As a specialist Afrikaans translation agency, we prioritise budgetary certainty for our clients. We use transparent per-word pricing with no hidden costs — you will always receive a fixed total in a quote to approve before any work commences. Our rates for English to Afrikaans and Afrikaans to English are based on the specific word count and the technical complexity of the material (such as legal, medical or engineering documentation). Our minimum project cost is R500 + VAT. We never penalise clients with increased fees for urgent requests; consistent, fair pricing is a core principle of our firm. Most government departments and corporate entities receive a firm quote within 5 minutes during our standard business hours.

Project duration is dictated by the volume of the content and the schedule of the specific linguist best qualified for your sector. We provide a guaranteed delivery time and date only after it has been confirmed by the translator assigned to your material. For time-critical requirements, urgent Afrikaans translation with a 24-hour turnaround is available for pre-arranged projects, ranging from Social and Labour Plan (SLP) updates to corporate announcements. If your deadline is non-negotiable, specify it in your initial inquiry and we will immediately confirm our availability to meet it.

Yes — with an important distinction. We do not provide sworn translations for personal immigration documents, such as a marriage certificate submitted for a visa application. Our focus is on institutional communication: technical and legal documents such as informed consent forms, PAIA manuals, legal contracts, court submissions and government tenders. In the South African legal landscape, a sworn translation is often a mere formality signed before a Commissioner of Oaths with no guarantee of linguistic accuracy. Our approach is more rigorous: every document is produced by a university-qualified Afrikaans linguist with over a decade of subject-matter experience, then subjected to our ISO 17100-compliant quality control process to ensure the final text is both legally sound and linguistically flawless. Explore our legal translation expertise.

Yes. For official and institutional use — including Western Cape provincial government documents, court submissions, PAIA manuals and public participation notices — a compliant Afrikaans translation must meet four core requirements. First, the translator must be a first-language Afrikaans speaker; proficiency in the language is not sufficient where the formal register of official documentation is concerned. Second, the linguist must hold an academic qualification in their home language — typically a university degree in Afrikaans linguistics or applied language studies. Third, the translator must have demonstrated experience in the relevant subject-matter field: corporate legal Afrikaans, for example, is a distinct discipline from community-facing public health content. Fourth, the translation must pass a quality control process that leaves the document in a print-ready state — meaning it has been run through an editing phase where it is proofread for readability and, vitally, checked for consistency and any spelling or grammar errors that were missed in the primary translation. All four conditions are standard in our engagement process, and we apply them whether the client is a Cape Town-based municipality or a national corporation publishing compliance documentation for Afrikaans-speaking employees.

Every assignment is handled exclusively by native Afrikaans speakers who hold university degrees in Afrikaans and have a minimum of 10 years of professional translation experience. Our quality assurance cycle includes a translation phase by a subject-matter specialist, followed by independent editing and our proprietary localised terminology checks. This human-only workflow ensures that our output is print-ready and culturally resonant — particularly vital for mining safety documentation and educational materials where precision carries real consequences.

Unlike isiZulu or isiXhosa, Afrikaans is relatively well-represented in AI training data — but this creates a different problem. AI-generated Afrikaans frequently sounds plausible while being subtly wrong: the idiomatic register is off, the "tone of voice" is flat or wooden, and culturally specific phrasing is missed entirely. In high-stakes content — a medical informed consent form or a mining safety manual — that kind of near-miss is more dangerous than an obvious error, because it passes a surface reading. We do not use machine translation post-editing or any form of unvetted AI output. Every sentence is the product of human expertise.

Afrikaans is a vibrant language with distinct regional registers. Content intended for a corporate audience in Pretoria or Johannesburg often requires a different tone than a community engagement campaign for the Western Cape or Northern Cape. Furthermore, in Cape Town, Afrikaans projects are frequently paired with isiXhosa translation to meet provincial communication requirements. Our professional Afrikaans linguists navigate these nuances to ensure your message connects authentically with your specific target audience.

We enforce a zero-sharing policy: your data is never processed by third-party AI platforms or sold to external vendors. Your files remain entirely within the iiTranslation ecosystem, accessed only by the specific linguist assigned to your project. Every member of our team is bound by a strict non-disclosure agreement as a standard condition of engagement. This level of security is vital for confidential legal contracts, HR records and commercially sensitive business content. You can view our full data protection measures in our Privacy Policy. We are always happy to sign NDAs if your organisation requires further assurance.

We handle a diverse range of written content, from legal documents to medical trials and digital localisation. For technical software and web projects, we work directly in HTML, XML and CSV formats. As specialists in South African languages, we regularly manage multi-language national campaigns that bundle Afrikaans with isiXhosa, isiZulu or Sepedi to ensure comprehensive reach across all provinces.

These three services are often conflated, especially by clients commissioning language work for the first time. Translation is the written conversion of a document from one language to another — it is a considered, quality-controlled process that produces a text suitable for publication, legal submission or institutional use. Written translation is the only service we provide. Interpreting is the live, oral rendering of spoken communication — used at hearings, negotiations, public meetings and medical consultations, either in person or via remote platforms. Transcription converts recorded audio or video into written text, such as turning a recorded Afrikaans stakeholder meeting or interview into an accurate written transcript. Each discipline requires a distinct skillset; a strong translator is not automatically a strong interpreter, and vice versa. iiTranslation focuses entirely on professional written translation.