Turkish Customs Translation

Documents that move with the goods

Customs translation is unglamorous and consequential. A shipment held at a border is expensive in a way that compounds daily, and the cause is frequently a document that does not match another document. The recurring set is the commercial invoice, the packing list, the bill of lading, air waybill or CMR consignment note, the certificate of origin, movement certificates such as the A.TR and the EUR.1, insurance documents, technical data sheets, conformity certificates, safety data sheets for regulated goods, and import or export licences. The traffic runs both ways: a foreign supplier's documents arriving for a Turkish importer, and a Turkish exporter's documents going to a buyer and a customs office abroad.

Turkey's trading relationship with the European Union operates through a customs union covering industrial goods, alongside free trade agreements with a range of other countries. Preferential treatment under these arrangements depends on documentary proof, which makes the accuracy of exactly those documents disproportionately important.

Who decides what needs translating

In Turkey, customs declarations are typically lodged through a licensed customs consultant (gümrük müşaviri), who deals with the customs office handling the goods. The consultant knows what that office expects to see in Turkish and is the first person to ask before ordering anything. If it is simpler, the consultant can send us the documents and receive the translations directly; tell us that is the arrangement.

Sworn translation, or a working translation

There is no single list: the customs office, through your consultant, and any other receiving authority decide. As a pattern, translations filed with an authority or relied on as evidence are the ones requested from a sworn translator (yeminli tercüman), sometimes with notary certification (noter onayı): documents filed in support of an application, powers of attorney and company documents, and anything in a valuation or penalty dispute that reaches a court, since Turkish courts work in Turkish and a foreign-language document is filed with a Turkish translation. A translation made so that your consultant understands what the goods are, such as a data sheet or a supplier's note on composition, is a working document and usually needs no certification. Notary certification on a working translation is money spent for no reason; the reverse mistake, a plain translation where a sworn one was required, costs a resubmission.

For exports the destination decides. Some importing countries ask for commercial documents to be translated, certified or legalised. Where the destination is outside the Hague Apostille Convention, legalisation runs through the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that country's embassy or consulate, and whether a particular trade document can be apostilled or legalised at all is something the destination office confirms. The buyer's customs agent at destination usually knows the list.

Consistency between documents is the whole game

Customs officials compare documents against each other. The description of the goods on the invoice, on the packing list and on the certificate of origin has to correspond, and a description rendered three slightly different ways in three translated documents invites exactly the scrutiny you were hoping to avoid. Quantities, units of measure, net and gross weights, values, currencies and party names must match across the set. Incoterms such as FOB or CIF stay as written, because they are defined terms.

For this reason we translate a shipment's documents together and hold the product descriptions and party names identical across all of them. Where the source documents themselves disagree, we flag the discrepancy to you rather than quietly harmonising it, because the mismatch exists in the originals and has to be resolved at source.

Product descriptions and classification

Goods descriptions are technical text pretending to be ordinary language. A component described loosely in one language can fall into a different tariff heading when rendered loosely into another, and the commercial consequence is a different duty rate. We translate the description as written and preserve tariff codes, including the GTİP codes (Turkish tariff and statistical positions) on Turkish documents, exactly as they appear in the source.

What we do not do is classify goods. Deciding the correct tariff heading is a matter for your customs consultant or the authority itself, and a translator who volunteers a classification is exceeding their competence in a way that can cost you money. If a description is ambiguous we ask you what the item is rather than choose.

What we need to start

Tell us which documents belong to the same shipment so that we treat them as a set, which of them the consultant or the receiving office has asked for and in what form, and the deadline you are actually working to; the timeline is confirmed before work starts. Documents often arrive as phone photographs taken at a warehouse. A legible scan is better, but we can work from what exists as long as every page and every stamp is in the frame. If earlier translations exist for the same products, send them, so the descriptions match what customs has already seen.

Related reading: translation for customs and export documents and translating technical documents for Turkish companies. See also Turkish Business Translation, Corporate Translation Services and Translating Turkish Documents for Use Abroad.