Romanian Translation

The article stuck on the end: a misleading resemblance

This is one of the few European languages that attaches the definite article to the end of the word. Turkish puts its own suffixes at the end too, so a translator can feel on familiar ground, but the resemblance is skin deep. The ending here does not carry definiteness alone: it marks the case and the gender of the noun as well. A form picked to match some Turkish suffix can push the word, without anyone intending it, into the feminine or into the genitive.

In an official document the upshot is this. The singular and plural, definite and indefinite forms of one word look markedly unlike one another. If the name of a party stands in the definite form in one clause of a contract and in the indefinite form in another, the lawyer reading it is left asking whether the same party is meant. A single usage is settled on for the whole document, and the consistency check is run as a stage of its own.

Where shared words mislead

The vocabulary of this language holds a fair number of words it shares with Turkish, left over from historical exchange. Most of them, though, now carry a colloquial, jocular or dated ring. Chosen for an official text because it looks familiar, a word of that kind breaks the register and makes the document read as carelessly prepared.

Legal vocabulary, by contrast, comes largely from Latin-derived terminology and the French legal tradition. In contract wording, then, one looks not at the word that feels familiar but at the definition in the relevant statute; of two terms that look alike, only one is defined in the legislation, and using the other leaves the provision without any footing.

Diacritics can invalidate a document

Several letters in this language are distinguished by a mark set above or below them, and losing that mark changes the word outright. The finer problem is whether the mark under two of the letters is a comma or a tail: two characters identical to the eye but separate in encoding, and institutional records systems will not treat them as a match.

Item	Risk	Correct practice
Letters with a mark below	A name written with the wrong character cannot be found in the register	The standard character set the institution uses is preferred
Spelling with the marks left off	The word comes to mean something else	Every mark is written in full
Turkish special letters	Swapped for a letter that looks similar	The spelling in the passport is kept
Headings in capitals	Marks are dropped on capital letters	The marks are written on capitals as well

The fields that drive demand

Road and sea transport come first. Carriage contracts, insurance policies, driving licences and vocational competence certificates are translated continuously, given the weight of freight traffic between the two countries. In the grain and container trade moving through the ports, customs declarations, analysis reports and certificates of origin add further volume.

The second field is citizenship and civil registration. Where an application rests on family ties, birth, marriage and death records are expected to form an unbroken chain, and one document in that chain translated with a different spelling brings the whole file to a halt. The third is higher education: applications to medicine and dentistry programmes have turned transcript and course description translation into a regular item.

The fourth field is manufacturing and installation work. Factory commissioning projects bring technical specifications, acceptance protocols and occupational safety instructions; in texts of this kind, units of measurement and standard numbers are carried across without conversion.

Names, personal numbers and dates

Official records place the surname before the given name, and forms expect that order. Translation keeps the order of the source document, but which word is the surname is shown plainly through the field labels. A woman’s surname before marriage is held in a field of its own, so the information in the civil registry record has to be carried into that field.

The personal identification number is a structured number that carries the date of birth and the sex within it. A single digit copied across wrongly therefore contradicts the date of birth, and the document snags during examination. Dates are written day, month, year and separated by full stops; when the month is given in words it begins with a lower-case letter.

As you put your file together, state the authority the document will be submitted to. To see the page count and the delivery date, upload your document and get a quotation; the unit rates, which shift with the way the translation runs and with the delivery option, can be reviewed here.