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Thai Translation Services

Verbatim Solutions Thai translation teams are professional linguists performing translation from English to Thai and Thai to English for a variety of documents in various industries including:

Dialects
The status of many of these dialects is debated.
Standard or Central Thai, spoken by about 25 million (1990), is the official dialect of Thailand.
Bangkok Thai can be included in Standard Thai or considered as a separate dialect.
Khorat. Spoken by about 400,000 (1984) in Nakhon Ratchasima.
Isan (north-eastern). The dialect of the Isan region of Thailand is sometimes considered a dialect of the Laotian language, which it closely resembles. Spoken by about 15 million (1983).
Thai Yuan or Lanna (northern), spoken by about 6 million (1983).
Southern, Pak Thai, or Dambro: spoken about 5 million (1990).
Malay or Pattani. Spoken by 3 million (1998) in southern Thailand.
Tai Dam. Spoken by about 500,000 (1990) in Vietnam.
Tai Daeng. Spoken by about 125,000 (1990) in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Phuan or Phu Thai. Spoken by about 400,000 (1993), mostly outside Thailand.
Lue(Dai). Spoken by about 78,000 (1993) in Thailand, and 250,000 to 1 million in China.
Song. Spoken by about 20,000 to 30,000 (1982).
Shan. Spoken by about 3 million (1993) in Myanmar.

Statistics from Ethnologue 2003-10-4. Most speakers of dialects and minority languages speak Central Thai in addition.


Thai alphabet
The Thai alphabet (q.v. for full details) is probably derived from the Old Khmer (??????????) script, which is a southern Brahmic script of the Indic family, and is quite complex from the perspective of Unicode and computer text rendering, because:
It is an abugida script, in which the default vowel is a long O.
Vowels associated with consonants are nonsequential: they can precede, follow, or surround their associated consonant(s).
Tone markers can occur at several places relative to the vowel grapheme.

There is no universal standard for transliterating Thai into English. For example, the name of King Rama IX, the present monarch, is transliterated variously as Bhumibol, Phumiphon, or many other versions. Each guide book, text book and dictionary invents its own system. For this reason, most language courses recommend that learners master the Thai alphabet before attempting the language.

The Thai Royal Institute publishes a set of rules for transliterating English words into the Thai alphabet, but these rules are not intended to be used in reverse.