By far the biggest challenge in translation services is ensuring the cultural and etymological context of an expression is adequately translated into another language.
This is part of what makes translating conversations and fiction so difficult, as the idioms that people inherently use often do not directly convert to another language, and the process of using an expression that conveys not only the denotation but also the myriad meanings is complex.
Often it involves going back into the history of a language and exploring why a certain expression is used and what it says about the culture of the people who used it.
With that in mind, it is interesting to explore the earliest known origins of Polish, given that due to various historical events, the Polish language only dates back to around the 12th century.
Whilst the pagans who lived in Poland prior to this had a strong oral tradition, early writers exclusively used Latin during a period known as the Christianisation of Poland, so very little of this early tradition was kept.
Polish existed as a spoken language, but between its emergence in the 10th century to the 12th century, it was not used as a written language compared to Latin, then considered the language of Christianity.
The first sign of change was the Book of Henryków, an account mostly in Latin of the history of the abbey of Henryków in Lower Silesia.
Whilst most of the 100 pages in the book are written in Latin, there is one particular sentence that is considered to be the earliest written sentence in what we know today as the Polish Language.
The phrase, which translates into English as “Come, let me grind and you take a rest”, can be traced to 1280, and from there, the Polish Language would spread and become one of the world’s leading literary traditions.