Swedish Translation

Words that have to be written as one

The best-known spelling problem in this language is the splitting of compound nouns that belong together as a single word. Splitting them is not just a blemish in the orthography; break the word in two and what usually appears is two words that genuinely exist but carry an entirely different meaning. On an official document that goes past being funny: it changes what the obligation is actually about.

The risk climbs wherever a Turkish possessive construction turns into a compound noun, because the Turkish structure already consists of two separate words and the translator carries that split straight into the target text. On top of this, nouns fall into two grammatical genders, the definite article attaches to the end of the word, and the structure has to be rebuilt once an adjective comes between.

There is a separate ending for the passive voice, and official texts lean on it heavily. Building the Turkish passive patterns with an auxiliary verb is grammatically possible but weighs the text down for nothing; administrative correspondence expects the short form.

An international standard in the date format

This country is one of the few that writes the date in year, month, day order, and the format is well established in official correspondence. Leaving the day-first date of Turkish documents untouched causes month and day to change places inside record systems.

Field	Format on the source document	In the target text
Date	Day, month, year	Year, month, day order
Decimals	Comma	Comma, with a space in thousands
Address	Neighbourhood and number	Street, number, postcode, city
Identity number	Eleven digits	Carried across as it stands, never confused with the local number

The files that make up the demand

Family reunification and residence applications form the largest item; civil registry records, income documents and housing contracts are submitted together. Work permits are the second item: the job offer, occupational certificates and the diploma. The third is higher education; because the central application system assesses the papers as one single file, a translation that is incomplete or abridged leads straight to elimination.

On the industrial side, mining, forest products, pharmaceuticals and defence keep demand for technical documents constant: specifications, inspection reports, safety data sheets and user manuals. In healthcare, treatment reports and prescriptions are translated for follow-up after the patient returns.

Taking part in public tenders is another steady item. A tender file brings the company’s registry records, financial statements, completed-works certificates and quality certificates together; when all of them are translated within one period and by one hand, no discrepancy opens up between the company name and the wording of its powers.

The expectation of gender-neutral wording

The official style guides of this country prefer wording that does not define a person through gender. In the names of occupations and posts, shared forms are used instead of gender-marked ones, and where a person is referred to, solutions that state no gender are given preference.

Turkish carries no grammatical gender in the first place, so the source text says nothing on the matter. That is exactly where the problem sits: the translator may be forced to state in the target text something the source never stated. The right approach is not to guess the gender but to build a structure that does not call for it. Where the source document states the gender openly, then it is carried across.

This preference may look like a question of style, but in corporate and promotional texts it is the first indicator of how local the text feels; reaching for the older gender-marked forms gives away at once that the text has come in from outside.

Name fields and the personal number

The records system holds separate fields for the forename, the middle name and the surname; a middle name is not a surname, and the second given name on Turkish documents does not go into that field but stays in the forename field. The alphabet of this language ends with three extra letters and is sorted accordingly; the special letters in Turkish names are not swapped for those three.

The personal record number contains the date of birth and a check digit; a separate type of number is used for people not resident in the country, and the two must not be mixed up. Send your document stating the receiving institution and see the quote and the delivery date straight away, or first look through the per-page rates.