Kyrgyz Translation

Two movements lie behind the Kyrgyz translation work that reaches us: students from Kyrgyzstan studying in Türkiye, and a workforce that moves in both directions between the two countries. To this is added the registry and contract paperwork of Turkish companies set up around Bishkek and Osh. The documents are short and typical, yet they hold traps that are not linguistic at all.

Is the document in Kyrgyz or in Russian?

Russian is widely used in official business in Kyrgyzstan, and a great many documents are drawn up either in Russian outright or in two languages. As both languages are written in Cyrillic, a document cannot be told apart at a glance. The Kyrgyz alphabet has three extra letters that Russian does not have, and their presence in the text shows that the document is in Kyrgyz. Work begun on the wrong assumption about the language has to be started over; that is why we read the file first to establish the language.

Kyrgyz is close to Turkish in structure; the suffixes work in similar functions. That closeness speeds the translating up but gives no such comfort in the vocabulary: the administrative and legal vocabulary of Kyrgyz was built by way of Russian, while the everyday language shares a great many words with Turkish. Coining a term in an official text on Turkish instinct gives the wrong result.

Frequent mistakes in translation from Turkish into Kyrgyz

• Running vowel harmony the way Turkish runs it. Labial harmony works more strongly in Kyrgyz than in Turkish and the suffixes change accordingly; a suffix picked out of Turkish habit produces the wrong form.
• Trying to “purify” Russian terms. Where an administrative term in the document is of Russian origin it has to stay in its settled form; producing a pure Kyrgyz equivalent makes the document unrecognisable in the eyes of the institution.
• Adapting personal names to Turkish spelling. This is the most frequent mistake and the most expensive one.
• Translating one column of a bilingual document and skipping the other.

Which documents are heaviest

Document	Context
Diploma, academic transcript, student certificate	University enrolment and recognition
Birth certificate and civil registry records	Residence permits, family procedures
Marriage and divorce records	Mixed marriages
Employment contract and work permit papers	Labour mobility
Company registry and tax records	Investments in Bishkek and Osh

Birth certificates call for particular care in this language. Birth certificates issued in Kyrgyzstan set out the mother’s and the father’s details on separate lines and with full names; civil registry procedures in Türkiye need those lines carried across in full. An abridged translation blocks the registration of the child.

In work permit files, the term of the employment contract, the job description and the pay clauses have to be matched word for word. These are the clauses the assessing institution looks at directly; a translation that summarises or simplifies gets the file sent back. Where the contract has annexes, they are translated too, since the list of annexes counts as part of the contract.

Transliteration of names and surnames

Surnames in Kyrgyzstani records turn up both in Russian-suffixed forms and in forms carrying the local suffix meaning “son of / daughter of”; the two can sit together within one family, and women’s surnames are inflected separately. We do not convert these forms into one another in translation but carry across what the source holds. For the Latin-script equivalent, the identity page of the passport governs. Reading the name afresh out of Cyrillic produces a spelling different from the one in the passport, and the institution is then unable to match the two documents.

When Turkish names are carried into Kyrgyz, one single set of Cyrillic equivalents is fixed for the sounds ı, ğ, ö and ü and is not changed anywhere in the file. The same rule holds for company names; a single spelling is recorded in the trade registry and every document that follows has to keep to it.

Turnaround and sending your file

Kyrgyz is a language with a mid-sized translator pool in Türkiye; student and civil-status papers come out within the standard time, while long commercial contracts may make us ask for extra time. When you send the document, add the identity page of the passport and the institution it is going to; if you are not sure whether the document is in Kyrgyz or in Russian, say so and we will look. For the fee and the delivery date, upload your document; you can see unit rates on our price page.