Somali Translation

Demand for Somali translation in Türkiye comes for the most part from files tied to migration and education: international protection claims, residence permit procedures, paperwork for scholarship students, and documents belonging to commercial and humanitarian aid projects directed towards Somalia. What these files have in common is that the document is frequently incomplete, or missing altogether.

The Latin alphabet, but with unfamiliar letter values

Somali is written today in Latin letters; its alphabet is comparatively recent and rests on a consistent set of spelling rules. What misleads is that certain letters stand for sounds altogether unlike the ones they carry in Turkish: two sounds produced in the throat are represented by letters no reader of Latin script would expect. Anyone reading the text on Turkish instinct voices the word wrongly, and with names that turns into a faulty transliteration. Long vowels, moreover, are shown by writing the letter twice, so losing one letter changes the word.

Grammatically the distance is wide as well: nouns carry gender, and some words change gender in the plural. The piece of information most often lost in translating out of Turkish is precisely this relationship of agreement.

Three generations in place of a surname

The naming system established in Somalia rests not on a surname but on a chain of generations: a person’s own name, their father’s name and their grandfather’s name, one after the other. The registration system in Türkiye expects two boxes, given name and surname, and will not allow them to be left empty. In practice the grandfather’s name goes into the surname box, but that decision has to be taken in the first translation and stay the same in every document that follows. Otherwise the same person shows up as two separate identities.

If you already hold a record issued in Türkiye, be sure to send it with the file; we will fix the spelling to it. When the documents of several family members arrive together, we build the chain consistently across the whole file and make the family relationship visible to the institution.

Frequent errors in translation from Turkish into Somali

• Trusting Arabic loanwords. Somali holds a great many words of Arabic origin, and a portion of them exist in Turkish too; their fields of meaning have drifted apart, however, and in an official text they answer to different concepts.
• Reducing long vowels to a single letter. The spelling system marks length by writing the letter twice; losing one letter changes the word and produces an identity mismatch in names.
• Translating the names of institutions. Some institutions in Somalia are known by an English or an Arabic name; the name that appears in the document should be kept and its explanation supplied in a note.
• Replacing place names with spellings picked up from the international press. Whichever spelling appears in the document is the one that governs.

Missing documents and the translation of statements

Type of work	Notes
Statements and interview records	The principal source where an application has no official documents
Birth and marriage records	Drawn up by hand; the seal may be illegible
School and diploma documents	Institutions named regionally; official counterpart unclear
Medical report	Somali, Arabic and English may be intertwined
Project and tender papers	Construction, health and education investment

In records of statements the untidiness of spoken language is preserved. An account rendered into corrected, well-formed sentences loses evidential weight. We do not guess at passages we cannot read; we mark them in a translator’s note. Institutions prefer a gap that has been marked plainly to a line filled in wrongly.

Dates on documents originating in Somalia are also found written in the Hijri calendar. We do not convert such a date on our own initiative: we keep the form used in the document and state the Gregorian equivalent plainly. The same goes for units of measurement and currencies, where whatever unit stands in the source is the unit that remains.

We speak plainly about timing

Somali has one of the smallest pools of sworn translators in Türkiye. This affects planning rather than quality: a job we could begin the same day in a mainstream European language may have to wait its turn here, and delivery can take longer. If you have a hearing or an appointment date, send the file without waiting; rather than name a day we cannot realistically meet, we set out the position from the start. For the price and the delivery date, upload your document; unit rates are on our price page.