Vietnamese Translation

Vietnamese has become one of the fastest-growing languages on our rate list in recent years. The reason is plain: in textiles, furniture, electronics and food, Vietnam is both supplier and competitor, and Turkish companies deal with that market directly. Among personal files, student paperwork and mixed-marriage documents stand out.

Diacritics are not decoration, they are part of the letter

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, but its letters carry two layers of marks: one shows the quality of the vowel, the other the tone of the syllable. Both layers can land on the same letter. Losing the marks does not make a word illegible, it does something worse, it turns the word into a different one. In a person’s name or in the heading of an entry, that means plain misinformation.

A technical problem sits on top of this. The same marked letter can be stored on a computer in two different ways: as a single character, or as a letter plus a mark. On screen the two look identical, but they will not match when a search is run in an institution’s system. For that reason we set the texts we deliver to one single form.

Common mistakes in translation from Turkish into Vietnamese

• Flattening the terms of address. There is no single word for “you” in Vietnamese; a whole set of words is used according to the age and standing of the person addressed. The wrong choice reads as disrespect in business correspondence.
• Skipping the classifiers. In Vietnamese a classifier word, which varies with the kind of object, comes between the numeral and the noun.
• Writing compounds as one word. Syllables are written separately in Vietnamese, and joining them out of Turkish habit breaks the word.
• Mixing northern and southern usage. Some everyday terms vary by region, and official documents use the standard form.

Which documents come in

Document	Context	Point to watch
Supply contract and order form	Textile and furniture imports	Clarity of the delivery and payment clauses
Factory audit and conformity reports	Supply chain audits	Preserving the standard numbers
Customs and origin documents	Import procedures	Exact transfer of product descriptions
Diploma and academic transcript	Student applications	Consistency of course titles
Civil registry and marriage records	Mixed marriages, residence permit	Keeping the order of names intact

The problem we see most often in commercial files is a contract that has been translated through an English intermediate text. A text that travels from Turkish into English and from there into Vietnamese loses meaning twice. Wherever possible we work from the Turkish source directly; where that is not possible, we suggest you state in the document which text is the original.

Audit reports, for their part, carry international standard names and clause numbers. We do not translate these, we keep them in their original form and give their explanations in Vietnamese. Altering a standard number opens the validity of the report to argument and may lead to the audit being repeated.

Name spelling and order

In Vietnamese names the surname comes first and the given name last, with a middle name between them. Since Latin letters are used there is no transliteration problem, but there is a problem of order: we regularly see the given name and surname boxes swapped when forms in Türkiye are filled in. In translation we keep the order of the source and, where necessary, state in a note which part is the surname. Where marked letters appear in the passport in their plain form, the spelling we treat as authoritative is the one in the passport.

The fact that a few surnames are very common in Vietnam creates a practical problem of its own: people who share a surname are easily confused with one another. We therefore check the date of birth and record number fields on identity documents separately, comparing them digit by digit against the source, since one box out of place ties the file to a different person.

Turnaround and sending your documents

Vietnamese is a language whose pool in Türkiye is widening but still limited; standard civil registry and education documents come out within a reasonable time, while for long technical files we may ask for extra time. When you send the document, tell us the sector, the receiving institution, any term list you have and the closing date for the application; so that the marked letters carry over correctly, attach the text as an editable file if you can. For a price and a delivery date, upload your document; unit rates are in our price list.