Urdu Translation

Most Urdu work reaches us from Pakistani students in Türkiye, from marriage files between the two countries, and from the textile and machinery trade. The language shares a broad Arabic and Persian vocabulary with Turkish, and that sets traps as readily as it offers help: words from a single root have taken on different meanings in the two languages.

The nastaliq script turns translation into a typesetting job

Urdu is written not in the naskh form common to Arabic but in nastaliq, where the letters lean and rest one on top of the next. In this form the word steps downwards, line height varies, and in an ordinary word processor the text piles up on itself. If you are going to print an official document, the font has to support nastaliq; if it does not, the text remains legible but moves away from the appearance the institution in Pakistan is used to.

On top of that, the Urdu alphabet holds retroflex sounds and special two-dot letters that Arabic does not have. Where the source is an Arabic document being carried straight into Urdu, missing those letters is a frequent flaw, and the word turns into a form that does not exist in writing.

The commonest errors from Turkish into Urdu

• Trusting words of shared origin. A good many words used in everyday Turkish carry an ornate, formal or wholly different sense in Urdu. In the text of a contract, that changes the scope of the clause.
• Leaving the number system untranslated. In South Asia, large numbers are named on the hundred-thousand and ten-million steps, and digits are grouped to match. Leaving an amount in a commercial offer grouped in threes out of Turkish habit invites misreading, and repeating the figure in words is the safest course.
• Flattening the forms of respect. Urdu inflects address to the person spoken to at three distinct levels. Petitions and official correspondence expect the highest of them, and a neutral translation reads as rude.
• Translating the names of Pakistani institutions freely. Most of those bodies are known by an official English name, and the established name has to be kept rather than turned into Urdu.

The document types most often requested

Document	Typical use
Marriage certificate and marriage contract	Family reunification and residence permit files
Birth and identity records	Registering a child, citizenship procedures
Diploma, academic transcript, student certificate	University admission and recognition
Invoice, packing list, quality certificate	Textile and machinery exports
Power of attorney and letter of consent	Property and inheritance matters in Pakistan

Some of these documents are drawn up in English in Pakistan, while marriage records, court judgments and letters from the local neighbourhood administration are in Urdu. Papers in both languages can arrive in a single file. On such files, separating out at the start which page is in which language lets us calculate both the fee and the turnaround correctly, and the English pages do not need translating from Urdu on top of that.

Name spelling and matching the passport

In Pakistani passports the name is written in Latin letters, and that spelling is often not the only valid rendering of the Urdu original: the same name may appear in several different Latin spellings. When translating documents into Turkish, rather than reading the name afresh from the Urdu original and writing it out again, we take the Latin spelling in the passport as authoritative. In the other direction, when Turkish names are carried into Urdu, a single choice is applied throughout the file for sounds such as ç, ö and ü, and that choice is fixed on the first page.

Records in which the father’s name stands in place of a surname are common. In translating such a document we leave the field labels exactly as they are and put nothing of our own into the box for “surname”; where the institution requires an explanation, it is added as a translator’s note.

Turnaround and price

Short texts such as civil registry and education documents move through the standard flow, while we set aside extra time for output that needs nastaliq typesetting and for multi-page contracts. Measured by the translator pool in Türkiye, Urdu sits in the middle range: not as wide as Arabic or Persian, but not as narrow as Pashto either. In busy periods we say at the outset that there may be a slippage of a few working days.

When you send the document, state where the translation will be submitted, whether to an institution in Türkiye or to an authority in Pakistan, since the chain of approvals changes accordingly. If you have a translation done earlier, attach it and we will fix the spelling of personal and institution names to match it. To see the page count and the delivery date, upload your document; unit rates are set out on our pricing page.

The information here is general in nature; the level of approval required for this language differs according to the destination country. It would be sensible to check the current requirements against an official source.