Efforts and challenges in translating concept to reality: The Dutch case

Frieda Steurs & Dirk Kinable
Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal
Table of contents

This chapter will consider the language and terminology landscape for Dutch, which is an official language in six countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname in South America, and the islands Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten in the Caribbean. Focus will be placed on the first two countries. Altogether, Dutch is spoken by about 25 million speakers. The two largest groups of native speakers are the around 18 million people who live in the Netherlands and the 6.8 million Flemish living in the northern half of Belgium, or Flanders (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 2023; Statistiek Vlaanderen 2024). These numbers make the language rank in 8th place in the European Union. By comparison, in terms of available Wikipedia pages it holds 6th place. The Low Countries, as the Netherlands and Flanders are called, are a very strong economic region with the two largest ports in Europe: Rotterdam and Antwerp. This triggers a lot of economic activity, constituting a strong international component with a huge need for translation and terminology work. At the same time, the Dutch language is strongly supported by language technology.

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