Czech Translation

Case agreement and a word order that only looks free

In this language, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals each take one of seven cases according to their role in the sentence, and every element of a noun phrase shifts into that case together. Where Turkish manages with a single suffix, three or four words change here at once. In document translation the work that eats the most time is not finding terms but building this chain of agreement.

Word order looks free at first glance, but the freedom is not meaningless: whatever is placed at the end of the sentence counts as emphasised. Carrying the Turkish order across unchanged produces a text that is grammatically flawless and wrongly stressed. In contracts that can generate a misreading of which party has undertaken which obligation.

The distinction of completedness in verbs is decisive as well. A Turkish phrase such as “shall be delivered” is rendered by one of two different verbs depending on whether the completion of the act or the process itself is meant; the wrong choice creates a dispute over when the obligation is to be regarded as performed.

The suffix problem in women’s surnames

In this country’s linguistic tradition, women’s surnames end in a particular suffix, and foreign surnames too are usually written with it in the records. The surname in a Turkish passport, by contrast, carries no such suffix. The difference between the two spellings breaks identity matching in bank, insurance and property records.

In official translation the rule is plain: a person’s name is carried across in the form given in the source document, with no suffix added. The suffixed form comes into being only in the target institution’s own records, and that is a matter for the administration, not for the translation.

Document	Critical point	Where it is used
Diploma and transcript of marks	Course titles and credits are carried across one by one	Higher education recognition unit
Vocational certificates	Practical hours are stated	Chamber of commerce and trades
Employment contract	Pay and duration items are preserved exactly	Work permit unit
Civil registry records	Names are carried across without added suffixes	Civil registry directorate

Which documents get translated

Employment and skilled migration files make up the largest item: an employment contract, a diploma, vocational documents, a criminal record certificate and a medical report are submitted together. The second item is higher education recognition; because engineering and health programmes call for curriculum detail, the volume is large.

The third item is industry. In the automotive and machinery supply chain, technical drawing notes, quality procedures, audit reports and safety data sheets come through for translation on a regular basis. In these texts, standard numbers and units of measurement are carried across without conversion. The fourth item is company formation and trade registry business.

What these files have in common is that the documents belonging to one person were issued in different years by different bodies. The name on the diploma and on the civil registry record, and the job title in the employment contract and in the vocational document, are expected to match exactly; that consistency can only be achieved by putting the whole file through one pair of hands.

Text length and page layout

Because inflectional endings lengthen words, the target text consists of fewer words than the Turkish source but longer ones. The total number of lines usually goes up. In documents whose layout has to be preserved, such as diplomas, identity papers and licences, that increase is absorbed not by shrinking the type size but by rebuilding the table and line plan.

Every stamp, signature and handwritten annotation in the source document keeps its place in the translation, and illegible passages are marked in square brackets. Since the institution compares the translation with the source line by line, this correspondence of layout matters as much as the accuracy of the text.

Writing dates, diacritics and numbers

In dates, a full stop follows the day and the month, with a space left between the figures; omitting that space is a common typesetting error. When the month is written out in letters it goes into the genitive.

The length and softening marks above letters distinguish meaning; a word written without them is usually a different word. Turkish special characters, for their part, are preserved and never swapped for similar-looking letters. As the birth registration number carries the date of birth within it, an error of a single digit produces a contradiction.

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