Serbian Translation

The first question in Serbian translation is not a question of grammar but of alphabet. Both alphabets are official in the country, and which one an institution works in varies. Government offices and the courts run largely on Cyrillic, while Latin script prevails in the commercial register, in banking and in private sector paperwork. Changing the script once the translation has been delivered is not merely a matter of converting letters; the stamp, the signature block and the typesetting all have to be rebuilt.

Case endings are where most document errors arise

Serbian nouns decline in seven cases, and proper names decline along with them. In a petition, a person’s name shifts shape according to its role in the sentence. That is where the trouble starts: a name written as identifying information in an official document has to stay in the plain, undeclined form. If the translator is carried along by the flow of the sentence and declines the name, the institution cannot match the name in the identity field against the passport. The same holds for the names of institutions and of cities.

The second structural difficulty is verbal aspect. Nearly every Serbian verb has two distinct forms, one completed and one ongoing, and choosing the wrong one changes whether a contractual undertaking has been performed or is still running. Turkish builds that distinction through context rather than through a tense ending, so the translator has to decide the point separately.

Frequent errors in translation from Turkish into Serbian

• Reaching for Croatian or Bosnian terminology. The three languages are close, yet they diverge over the names of institutions and of the months; the month names expected in Serbian are the international ones, and the Slavic-derived names of Croatian sit wrongly here.
• Mixing ekavian and ijekavian. The standard written form in Serbia is ekavian, whereas Serbian-language documents from Bosnia and Herzegovina follow the ijekavian form. Using both inside one text is taken as the mark of an amateur.
• Matching identity number fields wrongly. Serbia’s personal identification number is not a direct counterpart of the Turkish national identity number; the field label is translated, the number is carried across as it stands, and its type is stated.
• Failing to keep the order of an address. Serbian addresses put the street name first and the door number after it, and the postcode comes before the town. An address built out of Turkish habit can stop a notification from ever arriving.

The documents where demand concentrates

Document	Reason	Script tendency
Title deeds and land records	Property sales and inheritance	Cyrillic
Company formation and registry papers	Turkish companies moving into the Balkans	Latin
Civil registry and marriage records	Mixed marriages, citizenship	Cyrillic
Transport and customs documents	Road transit traffic	Latin
Court judgments, powers of attorney	Mutual legal assistance files	Cyrillic

Title deeds and company papers are the two areas that call for care rather than linguistic flair. In land records the plot and block numbers, the area figures and the wording of any annotation are carried across to the letter; even ‘tidying up’ the format of a figure can render the entry invalid. In company papers, the clauses covering capital, shareholding percentages and objects of the company are the parts the registrar compares word by word.

Transliterating names from Cyrillic into Latin

The two Serbian alphabets correspond letter for letter, so the rule for converting between them is settled. The real difficulty comes from the Latin letters Đ, Ć, Č, Š and Ž, which passports usually render without their marks. Where the document carries the marked spelling and the passport the unmarked one, an institution may read that as an inconsistency. Our practice is to take the passport spelling as the basis and, where necessary, to show the original marked form in a translator’s note. In carrying Turkish surnames into Serbian, likewise, one set of equivalents is fixed for ç, ş, ğ and ı, and it is not varied anywhere in the file.

What you need to tell us

Write down the institution you will be submitting the document to and the script you want. If you do not know, send us an image of the letter the institution sent you and we will look at it. Where the source document is in Cyrillic, the resolution of the scan takes on weight: handwritten Cyrillic letters that resemble one another cannot be told apart at low resolution.

Serbian is one of the Balkan languages where the translator pool is least tight; civil registry and commercial paperwork goes out within the standard time. The jobs that run long are more often multi-page court files and technical tender specifications. For the price and the delivery date, upload your document; for unit prices, take a look at our price list.

The information here is general in nature; the level of approval required in this language varies with the destination country. Since practice can change, work from the requirement as it stands at the moment you apply.