Work Document Translation for the UK

No Application Can Be Made Through an Employer Without a Sponsor Licence

Sponsorship sits at the centre of the work migration system in the United Kingdom. Before an employer can take on a foreign worker it has to hold a sponsor licence with the Home Office; a job offer from a company without one is no basis for an application, however good the offer. A licensed employer issues a certificate of sponsorship for the person it intends to employ, and the candidate opens the application with the reference number on that certificate. For the candidate’s document preparation this means the following: the backbone of the file is not the candidate’s own paperwork but the employer’s sponsorship record, and the candidate’s documents are read as evidence supporting that record. Having translations made before a job offer is in hand is therefore usually a premature step.

There Is No Sworn Translator, There Is a Certificate of Accuracy

The United Kingdom has no system of sworn translators. Translations of Turkish documents submitted to UKVI carry a statement (a certificate of accuracy) declaring the translation to be a correct rendering of the original document. The statement gives the date of the translation, the name and contact details of the translator or the agency, and a signature. Membership of a professional body such as the ITI or the CIOL is not compulsory, but it is seen as something that adds confidence. The practical consequence of this regime is that you concentrate on the completeness of the statement instead of looking for a formal stamp; an incomplete statement invalidates the document even where the translation itself is faultless.

A Separate Registration Track Runs in the Regulated Professions

Working in health, teaching, law and certain engineering fields calls for registration with the relevant professional regulator, quite separately from the immigration permission. That registration process generally asks for the diploma, the curriculum, placement documents and evidence of professional experience; language proficiency may be sought as a further condition on top. The comparison report obtained through UK ENIC shows the level of the education but does not stand in place of professional registration. Files put together without separating these two tracks can leave the candidate unable to start work in practice, even with the immigration permission granted. You can see which documents are translated on our document types page.

Which Document Is Used On Which Track

Document	Migration track (UKVI)	Professional registration track
Certificate of sponsorship	Compulsory	Not relevant
Diploma	Depends on the post	Compulsory
Curriculum / course descriptions	Usually not asked for	Frequently compulsory
Social security employment record and references	Supporting	Evidence of experience
Criminal record certificate	Asked for depending on the profession	Frequently asked for

The Most Frequent Ground for Refusal

The adverse outcome seen most often in work applications is that the documents submitted do not tally with the details on the sponsorship record: where the job title, the pay or the workplace address differ from one document to another, the application runs into a credibility problem. Second come translations with an incomplete statement, and third a mismatch between the spelling of the person’s name in the passport and the spelling on the document. How Turkish letters are carried into an English text is, for this reason, no trivial detail.

The Online Application Arrangement and Standards for Uploading Documents

The greater part of applications made to the United Kingdom runs through an online form, with the documents uploaded digitally. That arrangement gives rise to two concrete requirements on the translation side. The first is that the original document and its translation are uploaded separately and in a way that allows them to be matched to each other; uploading the translation alone makes verifying the document impossible. The second is that the statement of accuracy sits in the same file as the translation itself. Where the statement is placed in a separate file, the assessor may not be able to connect it with the translation it belongs to. Whether seals, stamps and signatures come out legibly in the scan also bears directly on whether the document is accepted.

Another common difficulty at the uploading stage is that only one page of a document is scanned. On diplomas printed on both sides, missing the seal or the registration details on the reverse can leave the document counted as incomplete. In the same way, skipping pages of a multi-page academic transcript blocks verification of the qualification. When handing documents to the translator, the safest approach is to proceed not on the basis of which pages will be translated but of the whole document being translated; in a system built on statements, a partial translation also makes the scope of the statement arguable. Checking one by one before uploading that each document’s original and translation pair is complete does away with most of the requests for information that would otherwise follow.

On the professional registration track the documents are often sent straight to the regulator, and some bodies want the document forwarded to them by the institution that issued it. In that case what counts is not the translation in the candidate’s hands but the document sent by the university; even so, a translation still has to be attached for documents drawn up in Turkish. What the candidate needs to do is find out beforehand which method of despatch the body accepts and correspond with the university on that footing. Since this correspondence can take weeks, the professional registration track should be set going before the immigration application. Some regulators, in addition, look for language proficiency as a separate condition, and the document showing that the condition is met may have a period of validity. Planning at the outset the order in which the registration file will proceed removes the risk of being unable to take up the post once the immigration permission is granted, and keeps the two tracks from waiting on each other.

This page is for general information; sponsorship and immigration rules are updated often, so confirm the requirements in force from the official announcements of UKVI (the Home Office) and of the professional regulator concerned. You can request a quotation for your file, look over the pricing page, and compare other countries in our country directory.