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 includes commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading and air waybills, certificates of origin, movement certificates used in preferential trade, insurance documents, product certificates and conformity declarations, safety data sheets for regulated goods, and import or export licences.

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 of origin, which makes the accuracy of exactly those documents disproportionately important.

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 that is rendered three slightly different ways in three translated documents invites exactly the scrutiny you were hoping to avoid. Quantities, units of measure, weights, values, currencies and party names must match across the set.

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 is something you will need to resolve 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 of that is a different duty rate. We translate the description as written and preserve any tariff codes exactly as they appear in the source.

What we do not do is classify goods. Deciding the correct tariff heading for a product is a customs matter requiring a customs broker 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 will ask you what the item is rather than choose.

Working to a shipment's timetable

Customs documents rarely arrive with comfortable notice, and they often arrive as photographs taken on a phone at a warehouse. We would rather have a legible scan, but we can work from what exists. Tell us which documents belong to the same shipment so that we treat them as a set, and tell us the deadline you are actually working to.

Related reading: translating technical documents for Turkish companies and translation for international business. See also Turkish Business Translation.