Slovenian Translation

The dual: a separate way of speaking about two

Alongside the singular and the plural, this language uses a third category of number: where exactly two entities are involved, nouns, adjectives and verbs all take separate forms. Turkish draws no such distinction. A phrase such as ‘the parties’ or ‘the spouses’ has one shape in Turkish, whereas here it changes with the number of people being spoken of.

In contract translation that has a concrete consequence. Using the plural in a two-party contract suggests the text covers more than two parties; using the dual in a three-party protocol, conversely, is an outright error. Before reading the text, the translator is obliged to establish how many people or how many institutions it concerns.

To that add a six-case declension system and the requirement of full agreement inside the noun phrase. A relationship Turkish builds with a single suffix alters several words at once here, and this is the area where the revision stage turns up the most errors.

Choosing forms of address and set phrases in official register

Polite address is obligatory in administrative correspondence, and it governs not only the pronoun but the verb form and adjectival agreement too. Carrying over, unchanged, the passive constructions customary in Turkish petitions makes the text look either unduly distant or unexpectedly familiar.

Area	Common error	Consequence
Two-party contract	Using the plural form	The number of parties becomes unclear
Name of an institution	Using the neighbouring language’s term	The document looks foreign in origin
Declension of names	Putting a person’s name into a case form	The match with the passport breaks down
Letters with diacritics	Dropping the marks	The meaning of the word changes

The files that make up the demand

Logistics and port trade come first. In transport running through the northern Adriatic, bills of lading, customs declarations, dangerous goods documentation and insurance policies are translated on a regular basis. The second area is work and residence procedures: employment contracts, vocational certificates, housing contracts and health insurance.

The third area is higher education; applications for the recognition of a diploma call for course descriptions and internship records in detail. The fourth is tourism and property: tenancy agreements, operating licences and tax documents. On the manufacturing side, technical files and certificates of conformity in the machinery, electrical equipment and pharmaceutical sectors build up the volume.

Because the country is small in scale, information travels quickly between institutions and documents belonging to one person are compared within a short space of time. That lifts consistency out of the category of ordinary quality measures and turns it into a condition of acceptance: even a difference between the way an address is written in one file and in another can bring a request for further documents.

What has to be settled before translation begins

What speeds a translation along in this language is not only the quality of the source document but a handful of questions answered at the outset. When the points below reach us with the file, the term set, the level of address and the number forms are all set correctly at the first attempt.

• The institution the document will be submitted to and the type of procedure
• The exact number of parties in a contract
• The spelling of personal names as it appears in the passport
• Terms and titles used in documents translated previously
• Whether delivery is wanted digitally or with a wet signature

The question about the number of parties is peculiar to this language in particular, and skipping it means the whole text has to be gone through again. Sharing documents translated earlier, for its part, keeps the same person from being referred to by different titles across different files.

Names, dates and place names

Personal names are not put into case forms in an official translation; the sentence is built so as to leave the name uninflected. Turkish special characters are kept. The father’s name and the mother’s name are held in separate fields and never merged into a middle name.

In dates a full stop follows the day and month figures, with a space between them; when the month is written in words it goes into the genitive. Turkish place names are not translated but carried across in their original spelling, with a brief note on the administrative level where that is needed. The decimal separator is the comma.

State the target institution before you send your document; you can then see the timing and the amount on the quotation screen, or review the unit rates first if you prefer.