Pashto Translation

Among the languages accepted in Türkiye, Pashto is one of the smallest by volume and one of the most delicate to handle. Almost every request relates to Afghanistan: international protection claims, family reunification, student paperwork and identity verification files. What these files have in common is the state of the document itself, which is often incomplete, filled in by hand or badly worn.

The translator pool is small, and we say so at the outset

The number of translators working under oath in the Pashto–Turkish pair in Türkiye is limited. This affects scheduling rather than quality: a job we could begin the same day in a mainstream European language may have to wait its turn in Pashto, and delivery can take longer. If you have a hearing or an appointment date coming up, send the file now rather than later and we will build the timetable around it. We would rather be straight with you from the start than name a deadline we cannot keep.

Pashto or Dari?

A good share of the documents that come out of Afghanistan are drawn up not in Pashto but in Dari. Both are official languages of the country, and because they draw on the same family of letters they look alike on the page. When an applicant says ‘Afghan’, it is rarely clear which of the two is meant. The first thing we do on receiving a file is to establish which language it is in; a job opened in the wrong language costs both time and money. For consonants articulated further back than anything Persian has, Pashto uses letters of its own, and those letters serve as a reliable tell.

Pashto is written from right to left and its grammar sits a long way from Turkish. Nouns take gender and case, and in past-tense transitive sentences the relationship between subject and object is built the opposite way round to Turkish logic. A translation that proceeds by matching one word to another therefore produces a text that does not hold together grammatically.

Another feature of Pashto is that the difference in pronunciation between its dialects works its way into the writing. Readers around Kandahar and readers around Nangarhar give the same letters different sounds, which surfaces in interpreting and above all when names are read aloud. In written document translation the practical result is this: one place name can end up recorded in two different Latin spellings and create a mismatch in later applications.

Frequent problems and document types

Document	Frequent problem
Identity card (tazkira)	Date of birth given as a year only; day and month blank
Marriage and divorce records	Written by hand, seal illegible
School reports and diplomas	Institution named regionally; official counterpart unclear
Court and administrative correspondence	Dates in the Hijri calendar
Medical report	Mixed languages; Pashto, Dari and English intertwined

Names and calendars: the two critical points

Most people on Afghan documents have no surname; a person is registered under their own given name and their father’s name. The registration system in Türkiye, on the other hand, will not accept an empty surname field. Whether the father’s name goes into the surname box is therefore settled by the decision taken in the first translation, and that decision sticks: every document that follows has to match the same spelling. If you already hold a record issued in Türkiye, be sure to send it along with the file so that we can fix the spelling to it.

The second point is the calendar. Dates on Afghan documents are usually written in the solar Hijri calendar. Carried across without conversion to their Gregorian equivalent, they leave the ages and intervals in the file failing to add up; converting them arbitrarily is no better. Our practice is to write the date exactly as it stands on the document and to state the Gregorian equivalent alongside it.

Before you send the file

If you are photographing the document with a phone, shoot it on a flat surface, without shadow and with the whole page in frame; an identity photograph with the edge cut off leaves the translation incomplete. Where a handwritten passage contains a word we cannot read, we do not invent one; we mark it as illegible in a translator’s note. Institutions accept that mark. What they will not accept is a piece of information that has been misread.

Tell us the type of application, the institution it is going to and the deadline, if there is one. If you hold documents belonging to several members of one family, sending them all at once works in your favour: we keep the spelling of names and place names consistent across the whole file from a single hand, and planning the work as one batch shortens the turnaround. To see the timing and the cost, upload your document; for item-by-item rates you can consult the price list.

This page is a guide; the firm price and date appear on the quotation screen once the document has been uploaded. Settling the format the institution wants at the outset saves redoing the work later.