<h2>Tibetan interpreters and translators</h2>
            CIT offers Tibetan interpreters and translators with legal, medical and specialty experience, including criminal and civil matters, employee meetings, engineering, patent cases, labor disputes, immigration and more.

            Although based in Los Angeles, CIT offers comprehensive Tibetan language services including interpretation, translation and transcription, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worldwide. Our interpreters and translators are native speakers who have been screened, certified, have provided credentials, field tested, and kept up to date with developments in both English and the Tibetan language through means such as lectures, conferences, and travel. CIT’s Tibetan language interpreters and translators possess in depth knowledge of the Tibetan language, as well as of the culture and history of the Tibetan people, allowing them to provide informed and complete interpretation and translation.
            <h2>The Tibetan Language</h2>
            The Tibetan language is spoken in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Tibetan is part of the Tibeto-Burman group of the Sino-Tibetan language. About 1.2 million people speak Tibetan, also known as Lhasa Tibetan. It is spoken in Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal and in some parts of India, particularly in the north. It is a Tibetic language and is the most spoken Tibetic language.

            There are four main dialects of Tibetan: Central, Southern, Northern and Western. Lhasa, named after the capital of Tibet and the form of Tibetan which is most used, is part of the Central dialect. Prior to 1950, Tibet was made up of three provinces. They were Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang. Amdo is now Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan. The Standard Tibetan language has three main forms: vernacular (known as phal-skad), formal (zhe-sa) and a formal literary and religious form, used for religious and classical literature (Chos-skad). In the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, the Tibetan language is an official language of the region. It is the language in which education is taught in primary schools. As children grow older, starting in middle school, the primary language of educational instruction shifts to Mandarin. One can, however, learn certain subjects in Tibetan in college.

            In the 600s AD, Songstem Gampo, who was the 33<sup>rd</sup> king of the Yarlung Dynasty and the first Emperor of Tibet, sent a minister named Thonmi Sambhota to India in order to bring back information on Buddhism. Sambhota then made a script for Tibetan. This script was heavily based on the Devanagari model. The newer Tibetan alphabet had been used initially to translate Buddhist texts into Tibetan. In the 800s, a Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionary called <em>Mahayyutpatti</em> was released. It used wood block printing that came from China. This wood block printing is still used today in certain monasteries.

            Literature in Tibet typically follows Buddhist themes along with literary pieces that were translated from Sanskrit and Chinese. Some other Tibetan works are about the Bon religion, which came before Buddhism and is native to Tibet. There is another form of Tibetan literature, called the gter-ma, which is work that had been concealed in scattered caves for several hundred years.

            The Tibetan language is written using a syllabic alphabet, or an abugida, that comes from Indian origin. It is written from left to right in horizontal lines. Each syllable is marked by a dot.