Italian Translation

The tradition of the long period

Italian legal language keeps up the tradition of the long period, holding several conditions, exceptions and cross-references inside one sentence. Turkish texts are long as well, but their length comes from stacked suffixes, whereas in Italian it is the chain of conjunctions and relative pronouns that stretches. The two kinds of length cannot be translated directly into one another. Trying to carry a Turkish provision into Italian as it stands produces a text in which it is no longer visible which condition attaches to which obligation; the provision has to be taken apart and rebuilt.

A further technical difficulty is the use of impersonal constructions. Official formulations built with the passive voice in Turkish are carried into Italian by impersonal patterns formed with a reflexive pronoun. Pick the wrong pattern and the text turns into a sentence that loads the obligation onto one particular party, which shifts the balance of the contract.

In terms of volume, the Italian version runs markedly longer than the Turkish. The reason is not only the use of articles and prepositions but the way the official register advances in pairs of synonyms; a single Turkish verb frequently becomes a two-word formula. Because the page structure of a certified translation is made to resemble the source document, this expansion is allowed for from the start.

The commonest mistakes in education terminology

Turkish and Italian higher education structures rest on different durations despite the similarity of their names. Writing out the duration and the credit value, instead of offering a word-for-word equivalent, speeds up a recognition assessment.

Turkish	Wrong match	The right approach
Lisans	Matched straight to a higher degree	Given as the equivalent of a three-year degree, with duration and credits stated
Yüksek lisans	A one-word equivalent	Explained as a two-year specialist degree
Ön lisans	Confused with a vocational secondary school	A two-year higher education programme
Staj	Presented as an employment contract	Described as compulsory practical training

The files that come in

University applications account for a large share of the volume, and in design, architecture, fashion and music the portfolio descriptions come into the translation too. The second group grows out of the close industrial relationship with Italy: in textiles and machinery, user manuals, maintenance instructions, declarations of conformity and warranty terms are translated as a matter of routine. The third group is family and inheritance matters. In food exports, labels, ingredient lists and health certificates form a delicate area in which a single wrong word can stop a shipment.

Culture and restoration generate a demand of their own. Reports prepared for archaeology, art history and architecture projects carry both technical and historical terminology; period names and material descriptions have settled equivalents, and those come from the literature of the field rather than from a dictionary. The same care applies to auction and insurance valuation reports.

On the legal side it is inheritance and property files that stand out. Title deed records, certificates of inheritance and powers of attorney call for extra explanation, because the remit of the Italian notary is wider than that of its counterpart in Türkiye; leaving the name of the procedure untranslated and describing what it involves heads off the misunderstanding.

Figures, units and capitalisation

The decimal separator is the comma and the thousands separator the full stop, which matches Turkish habit, though in documents that have passed through an English intermediate version the order may have been reversed. Capitalisation, by contrast, differs from Turkish: titles, month and day names, and the names of languages and nations are written in lower case. Carrying over the words that Turkish official correspondence capitalises out of deference gives the text a foreign look, and it is the first thing corrected at the typesetting check.

Name and date formats

Italian records put the surname first and the given name second; translation keeps the order of the source document, but states the field labels explicitly so that nothing is confused. Married women are commonly recorded under their maiden name, so that entry in the civil register must be visible in the translation. Turkish letters are preserved, not simplified.

Dates run day, month, year, and the month name begins in lower case. The place of birth is given not only as the province but with the district named on the source document; Italian administration records place of birth at district level, and missing place information holds an application up. Upload your document and get a quote together with a delivery date; for a line-by-line breakdown, have a look at the pricing page.

This page is for information; differences of writing system and typesetting can affect the delivery time. Settling the format the institution wants at the outset spares you the work of doing it twice.