Thai Translation

Two currents lie behind our Thai work: personal files tied to tourism and marriage between Türkiye and Thailand, and commercial paperwork from food, textiles and the automotive supply industry. Civil registry and marriage records make up the weight of the personal files, product documents and contracts the weight of the commercial ones.

Writing without spaces, a line that cannot be broken

Thai puts no space between words; a space marks only the end of a sentence or a phrase. The immediate consequence is that software has no way of knowing where the text may be broken at the end of a line. A typesetting programme without dictionary support will break a word down the middle, and the sense shifts for the reader. On work that needs page layout this is a separate checking step, and when it is missed the document becomes unreadable.

The second technical difficulty is that vowel marks may sit to the left of the consonant, to its right, above it or below it, with a tone mark stacked on top of them. If the font does not build those layers correctly, the marks collide. Tone distinguishes meaning: the same sequence of letters is an entirely different word under a different tone, so a dropped tone mark leaves a silent error in the text.

Common mistakes in translation from Turkish into Thai

• Leaving the calendar unconverted. Official documents in Thailand use the Buddhist calendar year, which differs from the Gregorian year. Leaving the year as it stands misstates dates of birth; our practice is to give the year as it appears in the source and state the Gregorian equivalent explicitly.
• Omitting the politeness particles. Thai official correspondence expects the polite elements that close a sentence, and without them the text reads as peremptory.
• Forgetting the classifiers. In Thai a classifier word, which varies with the kind of object, comes between the numeral and the noun.
• Translating institution names freely. Thai institutions have established English names, and those are what official correspondence uses.

Which documents come in heavily

Document	Context	Point to watch
Marriage and divorce records	Mixed marriages	Stating the calendar conversion
Birth certificate and identity record	Registering a child, residence permit	Name spelling matching the passport
Power of attorney and title deeds	Property transactions in Thailand	Completeness of the authority clauses
Food and cosmetics product documents	Import and licensing procedures	Exact transfer of ingredient lists
Contract and invoice	Commercial relations	Preserving amounts and dates

Marriage files are the item that comes in most often in this language, and they usually go through procedures in both countries at once. On files of this kind it has to be planned from the outset on which side the translation will be approved, since institutions in Thailand often look for approval from their own foreign ministry as well.

Product documents call for particular care with ingredient lists. In food and cosmetics applications, substance names are written under their international nomenclature; turning those names into Turkish or replacing them with a local equivalent invalidates the licence application. Percentages and units of measure are not converted either, but carried across in the form the source gives them.

Transliterating names

Thai names, and surnames in particular, can be long, and there is no single established standard for rendering them in Latin letters, so the same name may appear in more than one spelling. For that reason we do not re-read the name from the Thai script; we take the spelling on the identity page of the passport as authoritative. Short informal names used alongside the official one are common as well, but they do not appear on official documents and are not added to the translation. When Turkish names are carried into Thai, one table of sound equivalents is chosen and kept to throughout the file.

On Thai documents the person’s title stands before the name as a separate element and may change with marital status. Treating that element as part of the name is a mistake: in translation we show the title separately and enter only the name in the identity field. Otherwise no match with the passport can be established.

Turnaround and sending your documents

Thai is one of the languages for which the translator pool in Türkiye is narrow. Short civil registry documents come out within a reasonable time, while multi-page commercial files can take longer to deliver, and we say so at the start. When you send the document, write down which country’s institution it will be submitted to and give any deadline you are working to. For a price and a delivery date, upload your document; unit rates are on our pricing page.