Spa trips and thermal baths may have become fashionable over the last several decades, but this is nothing new for Hungary. Known for its thermal waters since antiquity, the country boasts 1500 thermal spas (with 450 being public), the world’s 2nd largest thermal lake, and one of only 2 natural thermal cave baths in the world.
The name of the aforementioned cave bath is the Miskolc-Tapolca Cave Bath and keep in mind, that in Hungary names do matter. There formal introductions involve using the surname/last name before the first/given name, which is rare outside of Asia. And when having children, if the chosen name is not on a government-approved list of names, it will require approval by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Yes, Hungary has certain rules when comes to names, but they did not prevent the country to give famous names to the world of entertainment. Just think of the world renowned escape artist Harry Houdini and the horror icon Bela Lugosi. Move behind the scenes, where the Hungarians played an even bigger role: Paramount was founded by Adolph Zukor; William Fox (formerly Vilmos Fried) started Fox Studios; and the classic film Casablanca was directed by Michael Curtiz (formerly Manó Kaminer).
Outside of entertainment, Hungary produced inventors, who came up with both weird and practical inventions. Brits call a ball point pen by the name of its inventor (László Bíró), while engineer Béla Barényi, credited with 2500 inventions, was instrumental in developing the Volkswagen Beetle; conversely, there’s the irritating Rubik’s cube (Ernö Rubik), and the hopefully forgettable musical condom, created in 1966 by Ferenc Kovács.
And both entertainment and inventions could be well powered up by good wine. And though most of us seem to mistakenly overlook Hungary when comes to good wine, the country possesses 8 grape varietals and 22 different growing regions, and has a history of growing wine from the 5th century AD. Hungarian Tokaji wine was so highly regarded that it was granted a designated wine area in 1737, 120 years before France’s Bordeaux region.
And not only the history of wine is old in Hungary, but the country itself is one of the oldest continuous ones in Europe. Founded in 896 AD, 170 years before the Norman conquest of England, and moreover, approximately a century after its founding, Hungary, circa 1000 AD, was actually larger than France.
Finally, we can not discuss Hungary without mentioning one of its most recognisable exports: paprika. This most popular of Hungarian spices, has been grown in the region since the early 1500’s. Though the peppers used to produce paprika are originally from the New World, the climate and soil native to Hungary are known to produce the best, richest, and most robust types of paprika.
The word paprika, first recorded in English in 1896, entered a large number of languages, and our international translation company has the in-house resources to translate from and into all of those languages, among many other. If your company is looking for multilingual translation solutions, -> click here for our list of supported languages, and when Hungarian translation solutions are what you currently need, -> click here to contact our Hungarian translation department.
