Polish Translation

Translating into a language with seven cases

Every noun, adjective and numeral in this language enters one of seven cases according to the job it does in the sentence. Turkish has case endings too, but it attaches them to the noun alone; here the adjective, the numeral and the pronoun standing in front of that noun must all agree with the same case. This is what eats up the most time in a document translation: change a single word and three or four elements hanging off it have to be re-inflected at once. In official texts thick with noun phrases, one case error is enough to reverse who granted authority to whom.

With verbs, the decisive distinction is completion. A Turkish phrase such as “payment shall be made” is answered by two different verbs depending on whether it describes an act that will be brought to a close or one that will continue. In a contract, the wrong choice breeds disputes over when performance is to be treated as rendered.

Inflecting numbers is a difficulty in its own right. The form a noun takes alongside a number depends on the number’s final digit. Official wording that states amounts, periods and page counts breaks this rule constantly; the resulting sentence may be perfectly comprehensible, yet it announces at once that a foreigner wrote the text, and in an official document that costs trust.

Noun inflection and the official document

In everyday speech foreign proper names are inflected as well; in official translation, though, the person’s name is left untouched and the structure around it is rebuilt instead. Otherwise the spelling in the passport and the spelling on the document no longer match, and identity verification fails.

Situation	Wrong solution	Right solution
Personal name inside a sentence	Adding a case ending to the name	Leaving the name alone and building the structure with a preposition
A woman’s surname	Adapting it to the feminine form	Keeping the form used in the passport
Turkish special characters	Substituting similar-looking letters	Keeping the original characters
Company name	Translating it word for word	Leaving the name as it stands and explaining the company type

The areas that swell the workload

Work permit files lead the way: employment contract, occupational certificates, medical report and criminal record certificate are submitted together. The second large area is road transport; driving licences, professional competence certificates, carriage contracts and insurance policies come through without a break. The third is manufacturing: in furniture, white goods and the automotive supply industry there is steady demand for technical specifications, quality reports and machinery manuals. Student applications and family reunification files also run right through the year.

Agriculture and the food trade make up a fourth area. Fruit and vegetable consignments bring phytosanitary certificates, residue analysis reports and storage condition documents; keeping substance names and units of measurement exactly as they appear in the source document stops laboratory results from being reinterpreted.

The outsourcing of IT services has created a further item of work. Service agreements, confidentiality undertakings and data processing annexes carry technical definitions as well as legal terms; holding those two layers consistent within a single text calls for deliberate terminology management.

Administrative units and job titles

The two countries’ tiers of local government do not line up. When the province, district and neighbourhood arrangement in Türkiye is forced into a likeness with the provincial and district arrangement here, the official reading the document assumes the wrong administrative level. The sound approach is to leave the name of the unit in its original form and define its level briefly. The same principle governs public sector job titles: the scope of titles such as director, chief and supervisor shifts from one institution to the next, and no single fixed equivalent will do.

Two traditions of writing the date

In figures, the order is day, month, year, with full stops between them. When the month is spelled out, the name follows the day in the genitive, which means the base form cannot simply be copied across. Official texts have a habit of placing the date after the name of the place, and that order is preserved.

Turkish province and district names appearing in the document are not translated but carried over as they are, with the administrative level explained in brackets only where it is needed. Once your file is ready, see the timing and the amount on the quote screen; if you would rather compare first, the current rate list is here.

What follows sets out the usual practice; the format the institution accepts should be confirmed at the outset. Settling that question early saves you from having the work done twice.