English Translation

The real difficulty is in sentence architecture

Official Turkish is written as one chain. The verb is held back to the end and participle suffixes stack clause upon clause until the whole provision arrives in a single breath. A sentence of the type “İşbu belge, ilgilinin talebi üzerine, kayıtlarımızda mevcut bilgilere dayanılarak düzenlenmiş olup üçüncü kişilere karşı ileri sürülemez” becomes unreadable the moment it is carried into English as one sentence. The right method is to unpick the chain, bring the subject forward and break the whole into two or three independent sentences. That breaking is not free-handed: in a legal text the condition carried by each subordinate clause has to survive, and no obligation may be dropped along the way.

How length behaves is part of the calculation too. Because Turkish packs information into few words through its suffixes, the English version usually runs to more words, while the total character count often falls. In practice that shows up as text overflowing the fixed boxes of forms and certificate templates. In documents whose layout has to be reproduced exactly, such as diplomas, identity papers and licences, the answer is not a smaller point size but a re-planned line grid.

Equivalents that come from the institution, not the dictionary

The commonest error is rendering the names of Turkish institutions and documents word by word. What comes out looks grammatically faultless and means nothing at all to the official reading it on the other side; that is why the application comes back.

Abbreviations are the second cluster of traps. The institutional abbreviations that fill Turkish paperwork convey nothing once they are dropped unchanged into an English text; they have to be spelled out, with the original abbreviation kept in brackets. The same principle governs registry, incorporation and file numbers: the number itself is not translated, but the record it belongs to is identified. Otherwise the officer examining the application cannot work out how two numbers on two documents belonging to the same person relate to each other.

Units and currencies are not converted either. If an amount is in Turkish lira it stays in Turkish lira, and only the decimal and thousands separators follow the conventions of the target language. Turning a contract figure into its foreign-currency equivalent goes beyond the translator’s remit and leaves the document open to argument.

Which documents are in heaviest demand

Education files form the backbone of the work: academic transcripts, diplomas and, above all, course descriptions. Bodies carrying out recognition assessments read the title, the credit value and the short description of every single course, so a translation that summarises the content puts the assessment into a dead end before it starts. The second cluster is residence and work applications: service records, bank statements, marriage and birth records. The third is trade, where distributorship agreements, declarations of conformity, tender specifications and arbitration correspondence all run through English, because neither party wants to use the other side’s language.

Health tourism is a heading of its own. A patient who has travelled here for treatment will hand the epicrisis, the test results and the discharge report to a doctor at home, so medical abbreviations and drug names have to be given in their international form. Writing the active substance rather than the brand name is, in these texts, a choice that bears directly on patient safety.

Names, surnames and how dates are written

There is one yardstick and one only for the spelling of a name: the machine-readable zone of the passport. Ş appears as S, Ğ as G, İ as I. The same spelling has to run through every document in the file, and keeping the original letters on one document while simplifying them on the next is exactly what must be avoided. The father’s name and the mother’s name, separate fields on Turkish documents, have no counterpart on English forms; they are not deleted in translation but carried over as separate lines.

Since 03/04/2026 can point to two different days, official translation spells the month out in letters. The Turkish formula that pairs a date with a serial number, meanwhile, becomes a single reference in English; separating the document number from the date makes any later verification impossible.

While you are putting your file together

Before sending a document, tell us the name of the receiving institution and the type of application; the level of approval follows from that. So that the page count and the delivery date come out straight away you can upload your document and get a quote, and you can compare unit prices item by item on the current price list.

The fees on this page are read from the current tariff and vary with the type of document and the speed of delivery. It is worth checking the current conditions against the official source.