Hungarian Translation

Structure that resembles Turkish, logic that does not

This is one of the languages in Europe with the most structural common ground with Turkish: endings come at the end of the word, there is no grammatical gender, postpositions do the work of prepositions, and vowel harmony operates. The resemblance makes translation easier and dangerous at the same time, because the translator’s attention has already slackened by the point where the overlap runs out.

The sharpest divergence lies in verb conjugation. A verb in this language takes one of two conjugation patterns depending on whether its object is definite or not. In Turkish, definiteness is carried solely by the accusative ending on the noun, whereas here the same information is reflected on the verb as well. Choose the wrong pattern and the sentence leaves the reader unsure whether a specific document or any document is meant; in contracts, that is how disputes about scope begin.

Possessive endings also chain together, and the chain follows a different order from the Turkish one. Multi-layered noun constructions, common in official texts, turn into single words of unreadable length if transferred directly, so the translator has no choice but to break them up.

Name order: the one exception in the region

The recording tradition of this country puts the surname before the given name. Found in no neighbouring language, this order is the single most common source of identity confusion when Turkish documents are translated. The order used in the source document is kept, but which word is the surname is shown explicitly through field labels; otherwise two-word Turkish names get read back to front.

Married women’s names have several official forms, some of which incorporate the husband’s name. The information in the civil registry record is not adapted to any of those forms; it is carried across as it stands, with the maiden name preserved as a separate field.

Field	Common mistake	Correct practice
Name order	Silently reversing the order	Keeping the source order and labelling the field
Maiden name	Merging it with the current surname	Showing it in a separate field
Father’s and mother’s name	Treating it as a middle name	Keeping it on its own line
Turkish special characters	Substituting similar letters	Preserving the passport spelling

Where the work comes from

Students arriving on scholarship programmes come first; an application file asks for the diploma, the academic transcript, letters of reference and a medical report together. The second area is industry: automotive and electronics plants generate a steady flow of technical instructions, quality procedures, supplier agreements and occupational safety documents.

The third area is residence and employment. The fourth is medical education, where applications to medicine and dentistry programmes call for course descriptions in detail. In logistics and the agricultural trade, the volume comes from carriage contracts, customs declarations and phytosanitary certificates.

Grading systems and degree equivalents

Nothing in educational documents raises more questions than grading scales. The scale used in this country’s school system differs from the 100-point and 4-point systems in Türkiye both in the number of steps and in its direction; on some scales a low figure indicates success.

Converting the grade is not the translator’s job. Figures and letters from the source document are carried across as they stand, and the definition of the scale is translated in full where the document contains it; where it does not, the school’s published explanation of the scale is added to the file separately. Conversion rests with the body carrying out the recognition assessment, and a translator who strays into that territory makes the document’s reliability arguable.

The same principle applies to the names of degrees: instead of hunting for an equivalent, we state the duration, the credit load and the programme it was awarded in. Measurable information always carries more weight than a word-for-word equivalent.

Dates, addresses and figures

In its date format this language stands alone in the region: the year comes first, then the month, then the day, each followed by a full stop. Copying the day-first date from a Turkish document straight across swaps the day and month figures and leads to the date of birth being read incorrectly.

Month names written out begin with a lower-case letter. In addresses the postcode sits on its own line after the name of the town, and the street name is followed by the house number. The decimal separator is a comma, the thousands separator a space.

Before you send your document, tell us the receiving institution and the type of application; the terminology set and the name fields are built around that. To see the turnaround and the cost, upload your document for a quote, and for a line-by-line breakdown consult the current rate list.