Ukrainian Translation

A vocabulary not to be confused with the neighbouring language

The greatest translation risk in this language is drifting into the vocabulary of the neighbouring language it resembles. The two share words that look almost identical yet carry different meanings, and in legal and administrative terminology that resemblance is especially treacherous. Reaching for the word that feels familiar in the source text can mean putting the wrong concept into an official document.

Place names raise the same problem. The international spelling of towns and regions follows the country’s own official transliteration rule, and forms written out of old habit are no longer accepted. Translations use the current official form.

Some older documents may have been drawn up in another language altogether. Those documents are translated from their own source language; adapting their content to today’s official language falls outside the translator’s remit.

The vocative and forms of official address

This language makes living use of the case form that puts a name into a distinct shape when the person is addressed directly. Official correspondence expects that form when the addressee is named; an address left in the base form reads as blunt or slapdash.

Turkish has nothing of the kind, so the detail is often missed in translations of petitions and correspondence. Conversely, in identity fields and document headings the name is never inflected at all; the two uses must not be run together.

Point	Wrong practice	Right practice
Place names	Using the old international spelling	Using the current official transliteration
Address to a person	Leaving the name in the base form	Using the vocative form
Identity field	Inflecting the name	Keeping the passport spelling
Choice of term	Taking the neighbouring language’s term	Taking the term used in the legislation in force

The documents that make up the demand

Residence and protection applications form the largest single item; civil registry records, education documents, medical reports and papers evidencing work history are submitted together. The second item is education: recognition of degrees from medicine and engineering programmes calls for course descriptions and placement records in considerable detail.

The third item is agriculture and the food trade; grain and oilseed shipments bring analysis reports, certificates of origin and carriage contracts. The fourth is family matters: marriage files, birth records and custody arrangements. In the IT sector, remote working agreements generate a steady volume of their own.

The fifth item is transport: driving licences, professional competence certificates and carriage contracts are translated continuously because of the freight traffic moving by road and by sea.

When the original document cannot be obtained

A recurring difficulty in files involving this language is that the original document is simply not to hand. All that exists may be a photograph, a screenshot, or a printout the institution generated electronically.

The translation is still produced, but the nature of the source is stated openly: whether the work was done from the original, from a copy or from an electronic printout appears on the face of the translation. Where that declaration is omitted, and the original is later called for, what the translation rested on becomes open to argument.

On documents reissued as a duplicate, the number and the date may differ from those of the first document. To show that the two record the same fact while remaining separate entries, a full translation of both goes into the file.

Given name, father’s name and date

The records use a middle name derived from the father’s name; Turkish documents contain no such derived form. The father’s name is carried over as it appears in the source document, under its own field heading, and is not derived according to the local rule. For the transliteration of names, the passport governs, and the same spelling is kept across every document in the file.

Dates are written day, month, year, separated by full stops; when the month is spelled out it takes the genitive and begins with a lower-case letter. The decimal separator is the comma. The personal identification number is carried over exactly and never confused with local numbers.

If your file contains documents in several languages, send them all together; consistency of names and place names can only be built across the whole. Upload your documents and get a quote, or look over the current rates first.