Bosnian Translation

Most Bosnian translation work falls under two headings: property, inheritance and citizenship files in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the registry matters of Bosniak families living in Türkiye. To these has been added, in recent years, the paperwork of tourism, construction and the food trade. The language’s relationship with Turkish offers the translator an advantage and a trap in equal measure.

Words of Turkish origin set the trap

Bosnian contains markedly more words of Turkish origin than its neighbouring languages, and they are alive in daily use. What a word means in Turkish today and what it means in Bosnian have, however, usually parted company: some have become archaic in Turkish, others have narrowed or widened in Bosnian. Trusting a familiar-looking word and not opening the dictionary is the commonest kind of error we see in this language pair. In official paperwork most of these words do not appear at all; the language of law is built on terms of Slavic and Latin origin.

Two entities, two sets of terminology

Because Bosnia and Herzegovina has a dual administrative structure, the same procedure goes by different names from one region to the next. The terms used for the local government unit, the registry office and the tiers of the court system differ between the Federation and Republika Srpska, and in Republika Srpska you will also come across Cyrillic spelling. A translation produced without knowing which canton or entity the document is to be submitted to may be linguistically correct and administratively wrong. That is why, when we take a file in, we ask which municipality or court it is bound for.

Bosnian is written in the Latin alphabet and uses the letters č, ć, ž, š and đ. Dropping the diacritics on these is enough to turn one word into another. The habit, common in correspondence, of writing without them and moving on has no place in official translation.

Documents we translate most often

Document	Purpose of use
Title deed record and land register extract	Division of an estate and transfer of property
Citizenship and civil registry documents	Dual citizenship applications
Court judgment and certificate of inheritance	Registering an estate held abroad
Diploma and nostrification papers	Recognition and job applications
Company registry and tender documents	Construction and supply work

Of the items on that list, inheritance files call for particular care. Property records in Bosnia and Herzegovina were kept for a long period in two separate register systems, so the same plot may have two different entries; the translation must state which of the registers the entry was taken from, together with the name and number of that register. Rather than translate register names that have no Turkish counterpart, we keep the original name and add an explanatory note beside it.

Names, surnames and identity numbers

Bosnian documents carry the father’s name as a separate field alongside the person’s own name; the same information exists in Turkish records but under a different label. The field has to be translated by its counterpart in the source document, not by an invented name. In surnames, the letters đ, č and ć have usually been reduced to plain letters in the passport; we take the passport spelling as authoritative and, where needed, give the original spelling in a note. In the other direction, fixed equivalents are agreed for the Turkish letters ı, ğ and ö.

The thirteen-digit personal identification number carries the date of birth and a regional code within it. This number is never reformatted, and no spaces or hyphens are added; it is carried across exactly as it stands. The same rigour applies to cadastral plot numbers, since in property transactions a single digit points to a different piece of land.

Getting the work started

Tell us the entity, the canton and the institution the document is going to, and attach any earlier translation so that terminology stays consistent. A sizeable share of Bosnian translations then go through nostrification or notarisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina; the institution says which approval it wants, and we deliver the translation in a form that fits that chain.

In terms of the translator pool, Bosnian is one of the languages we can work in comfortably in Türkiye, and short civil registry and educational documents come out in the standard time. For multi-page property files and older court judgments, where handwriting and archaic terminology are dense, we may ask for extra time. To see the fee for your page count and the delivery date, upload your document; item-by-item rates are on our pricing page.

This content is for guidance; the exact fee and date appear on the quotation screen once the document has been uploaded. Practice can change, so take the conditions applying at the time of your application as the ones that count.