Georgian Translation

Georgian is the language of daily life along Türkiye’s eastern Black Sea border. The lorry traffic through the Sarp crossing, the movement of patients and students to Batumi, company formations and property purchases on both sides keep up a constant flow of documents in this language. Demand is concentrated geographically, and the documents accordingly fall into a few fixed types.

What does an alphabet without capital letters mean in practice?

The Georgian alphabet draws no distinction between upper and lower case. That produces a consequence invisible in the translation itself but immediately apparent in the typesetting: headings, institutional names and warnings of the “CAUTION” sort, all emphasised in Turkish with capitals, cannot be emphasised the same way in Georgian. Software that tries to convert the text to capitals corrupts the letters. Emphasis is given instead by bold type or by letter spacing. That is why we rebuild the heading structure when we carry official document templates into Georgian.

The letters of the alphabet are related to neither the Latin nor the Cyrillic script; automatic recognition software usually fails on scanned Georgian documents. The quality of the scan that reaches us therefore has a direct effect on the timescale.

Why the grammar puts up so much resistance

In Georgian the verb carries markers pointing to the subject and the object at one and the same time; a single verb form can be matched in Turkish only by a whole clause. To this is added a structure in which, in certain past-tense sentences, the subject takes a case ending of its own. The result is that a translation matching word to word stops the sentence from saying who did what to whom. In powers of attorney and court judgments, that changes the legal outcome directly.

• A frequent error: Turkish passive sentences built as actives in Georgian, so that a party left unspecified becomes specified.
• A frequent error: making nouns plural when they stand with a numeral; in Georgian the noun stays singular after a number.
• A frequent error: writing place names in the older forms that came through Russian. Institutions in Georgia today take the Georgian names as the standard.

The documents of border trade

Document	Use
CMR, invoice, certificate of origin and TIR carnet	Road haulage via Sarp
Company formation and tax records	Setting up a company in Batumi and Tbilisi
Discharge summaries, test results and operation reports	Healthcare obtained in both directions
Title deed, lease and power of attorney	Purchase and management of property
Diplomas and student certificates	University enrolment

Medical documents hold a particular place in this language. In discharge summaries medicines are written with the international name of the active substance, while trade names differ; keeping the active substance in the translation and giving the trade name in brackets heads off the wrong medicine being taken.

Transliteration of names

Georgian surnames mostly end in fixed suffixes that vary by region, and those suffixes can be written in more than one way in the Latin alphabet. If one surname appears with two different spellings in two documents, the institution in Türkiye cannot match them. Our practice is to take the Latin-letter field of the passport as the standard and not to depart from it anywhere in the file. In the other direction, the Georgian alphabet offers suitable equivalents for the ç, ş, ı and ğ sounds of Turkish names; here too a single set is chosen and fixed.

The father’s name may appear as a separate field in Georgian documents; we translate that field and do not move its contents into the surname box. Records of earlier date may also carry the Russian transliteration of the name; three separate spellings then face us, and which is to be taken as the standard must be settled at the very start.

Timescale, certification and submission

Thanks to our border provinces, the pool of translators in this language is reasonably wide; standard civil registry, commercial and medical documents are delivered within the normal time. The jobs that run long are chiefly older title deed records and handwritten archive material. For documents going to Georgia, an apostille and notarisation are often required; for documents coming into Türkiye the same chain runs in reverse.

When you send the file, state which country’s institution the document will be submitted to and the type of matter. With medical documents it also matters that the patient’s name matches the passport. For the fee and the delivery date, upload your document; unit prices appear on our price page.

The fees on this page are read from the current tariff and vary with the type of document and the speed of delivery. Confirming the current requirement before you apply saves time.