Turkish Document Translation

The everyday documents, and where they are going

Most of the work on this page concerns personal documents that people need in a second language at a particular moment in their lives: birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates, identity documents and passports, criminal record extracts, driving licences, military service documents, vaccination and health records, bank statements, title deeds, rental agreements and utility bills used as proof of address.

Foreign nationals in Turkey usually need them in Turkish: for a residence permit application to the Provincial Directorate of Migration Management (İl Göç İdaresi) through e-ikamet, a work permit with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, a marriage at a municipal marriage office (evlendirme memurluğu) or a citizenship file. Turkish citizens need the reverse: Turkish documents in another language for a consulate, a university, an employer or a registry abroad. Each office publishes its own list and decides what it accepts, so the list in your hand, not a general rule, sets the scope of the work.

These documents are short, formulaic and unforgiving. A one-page birth certificate contains names, dates, place names, official titles and seal text, and every one of those is a place where an error causes a rejection that has nothing to do with the quality of the prose.

Turkish documents have their own forms

Turkish civil registry documents come in several forms, and requesting the wrong one is a common false start. When an office asks for a full record rather than a single certificate, the document in question is usually the tam vukuatlı nüfus kayıt örneği (full civil registry record), which lists the recorded events rather than one of them; the office confirms which form it wants. Many of these documents can be obtained from e-Devlet with a barcode the receiving party can verify online, and the translation reproduces the barcode reference and verification note so that the check still works from the translated copy.

Title deeds (tapu) from the title deed office (tapu müdürlüğü) carry parcel and share descriptions that have to be rendered the same way across every document in a property file. Driving licences and military service documents carry category codes and abbreviations, which are translated with their meaning rather than copied. The glossary of Turkish official document terms lists the vocabulary you will meet at the counter.

Names, dates and seals

Transliteration is the recurring problem. A name written in Cyrillic or Arabic script can be rendered into Latin script several defensible ways, and the only one that matters is the one already on your passport, because that is the document everything else will be checked against. Send us the passport page alongside the certificate and the problem disappears.

Dates are the second trap. Turkish documents write dates day first, so 03.04.2024 is 3 April, while a reader used to the American order sees March 4. We render dates unambiguously and, where the source is genuinely ambiguous, ask rather than assume.

Seals, stamps and handwritten annotations are part of the document and are translated, not omitted. If a stamp is illegible in the scan we tell you rather than guess at it, because an invented seal text is a fabrication in a legal document. This is also why we ask for scans that include the edges and the reverse of every page.

Which level of formality you need

For use inside Turkey, a sworn translation is often sufficient, with notary certification added where the receiving office requires it. For use abroad, the usual sequence is sworn translation, notary certification, then an apostille, or consular legalisation for a country outside the Hague Convention. A foreign document is apostilled in its own country before it is translated here. The receiving office decides which level it needs, so ask it before ordering: paying for notarisation and apostille that nobody asked for is the most common avoidable expense in this category. Each step has its own page: Turkish Sworn Translation, Turkish Notary Translation and Apostille Services in Turkey.

One practical note on validity: some authorities will not accept extracts issued more than a certain period before submission, and a translation cannot rescue an expired original. If your criminal record extract or civil status certificate has been sitting in a drawer, obtain a fresh one before paying to have it translated.

Files for a family or a team

HR teams, law firms and relocation consultants often send the same documents for several people at once: passports, diplomas, marriage certificates and criminal record extracts for an employee and family moving to or from Turkey. Two things keep such a file clean. Agree one spelling for each name across the whole set at the start, and tell us which documents go to which office, since a residence permit file and a work permit file may ask for different forms of the same certificate. Company records themselves are covered under corporate translation services.

To start, send a complete scan of each document, the passport pages for the names involved, and the requirements list from the receiving office; the timeline is confirmed before work starts. Related reading: getting a birth certificate translated.