Turkish Website Translation

Localisation, not sentences swapped

A translated website is not a website with the sentences swapped. Translation renders the words; localisation makes the page work for a reader in another market: formats, forms, examples, the legal texts a customer expects, and the terms people actually search for. The work runs both ways, for foreign companies entering the Turkish market and for Turkish exporters, hotels and software firms taking their sites into English, German, Arabic or Russian.

Text expands and contracts between languages, and a navigation label that fits in English can break a menu in German or Russian. Turkish agglutination produces long single words where English uses several short ones, and Turkish strings often run longer than English in an interface. Arabic runs right to left, which affects layout, iconography, form fields and the direction of anything with an implied arrow of time. Chinese needs no word spacing and breaks lines differently. None of this is visible in a spreadsheet of strings, and all of it is visible on the page, which is why we ask to see the site and not just the copy: the correct translation of a two-word label depends on whether it is a button, a heading or a table column.

Turkish-specific traps

• Dotted and dotless i. Turkish has İ/i and I/ı as separate letters. An uppercase transform applied with English rules turns "bilgi" into "BILGI" instead of "BİLGİ", and lowercasing "KAPI" gives "kapi" instead of "kapı". Declaring the page language as Turkish (lang="tr") and using locale-aware case functions fixes it; headings styled in capitals are where it shows first.
• Numbers and dates. Turkish writes 1.234,56 where English writes 1,234.56, puts the percent sign before the number, and writes dates as DD.MM.YYYY. Input fields and validation rules built for English formats misread Turkish input.
• Sorting. The Turkish alphabet puts ç after c, ğ after g, ı before i, and ö, ş and ü after o, s and u. A list of cities or product names sorted by character code pushes those letters to the end.

Legal texts for selling in Turkey

A site that sells to consumers in Turkey carries texts that are not marketing copy: the distance sales contract (mesafeli satış sözleşmesi), the preliminary information form (ön bilgilendirme formu), the privacy notice (aydınlatma metni) under KVKK, Turkey's personal data protection law, and the cookie policy. These need legal-grade translation, done with the care of a contract. Which texts your site must carry, and whether a translated foreign template is adequate, are questions for your lawyer: we translate the text you or your lawyer provide, and we do not draft it or adapt it to Turkish law. The same applies in reverse to a Turkish company's terms translated for foreign customers.

Website copy is not filed with an authority, so it does not need sworn translation or notary certification. The exception is a page that becomes evidence, in a dispute for example; the court or office receiving it then decides the form.

Search visibility in the target language

Translating a page well and translating it findably are different objectives. Turkish keyword research is a separate task from translation and comes before the copy is written: the phrase your customers search for in Turkish is often not the literal translation of your English keyword, and some searchers type Turkish without its special letters. We work from the terms people use rather than a dictionary rendering, while keeping the copy natural, because keyword-stuffed text repels the human who eventually arrives.

On the technical side, each language version needs its own stable URL and has to declare its relationship to the other versions, so that a search engine treats them as alternates rather than duplicates. Getting this wrong is a common reason a well-translated site underperforms. This site is built the same way, so we are describing something we maintain rather than something we have read about.

Review on staging, then maintenance

Before launch, read the translation where it will live, on a staging copy of the site. Check headings in capitals, truncated buttons and menus, line breaks, forms with their validation and error messages, the emails the site sends, date pickers and sorted lists. Check the strings people forget: page titles and meta descriptions, image alternative text, cookie and privacy notices, and text inside images. Alternative text and error messages are the two most commonly missed, and they matter most to people using assistive technology in the target language. Access to the staging copy, or screenshots showing where each string appears, lets the review start from context rather than from a spreadsheet.

A translated site is a commitment, not a delivery. When the English changes, every other language drifts, and a site whose Turkish pages describe last year's services is worse than one with no Turkish pages. Decide before launch who updates the translations and how they will know an update is needed.

Related reading: how to translate your website for a Turkish audience and professional translation for tourism businesses. See also Turkish Business Translation, Legal Translation in Turkey and Corporate Translation Services.