Turkish Document Translation

The everyday documents

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 certificates, marriage and divorce certificates, death certificates, identity documents and passports, criminal record extracts, driving licences, military service documents, vaccination and health records, bank statements, property title deeds, rental agreements and utility bills used as proof of address.

They are short, they are formulaic, and they are unforgiving. A single-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.

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. A date written as 03/04/2024 is ambiguous between conventions, and a certificate that records a birth in March can arrive claiming April. 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 will 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 and notary certification is added where the receiving office requires it. For use abroad, the sequence is sworn translation, notary certification, then apostille where the destination country is a party to the Hague Convention. Check with the office receiving the document before ordering, since paying for notarisation and apostille that nobody asked for is the most common avoidable expense in this category.

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 for a year, obtain a fresh one before paying to have it translated.

Related reading: getting a birth certificate translated, translating marriage certificates and understanding land registry documents. See also Turkish Notary Translation and Apostille Services in Turkey.