Sworn Translation in Balıkesir

The bulk of the files that reach us from Balıkesir come not from the world of business but from people’s life stories. The pension, health and inheritance matters of families who worked in Germany for decades and have come home, or plan to, are the most distinct heading in the demand from the province. We have built this page around that heading.

What these files have in common is that they are never a single document. They usually arrive as a folder full of papers, a substantial part of which is correspondence that does not in fact need translating. The first thing we do is sift out the documents that will genuinely be submitted to an institution; a fifty-page folder often comes down to fifteen. That sifting alone makes a real difference to the cost, and it is free of charge.

Pension and social security files

Having time worked abroad taken into account in Türkiye, or the same procedure the other way round, calls for a thick file of paperwork. Social security employment records, employers’ letters, contribution statements, insurance records and, often, contracts dating back decades… What these documents have in common is that they are dense with numerical data. When a date or a number of contribution days is carried across wrongly, the problem ceases to be a translation error and becomes a loss of entitlement.

For that reason we apply a two-stage check to pension files: the first stage covers the text itself, the second only the figures, the dates and the names of institutions. That second check is scaled not to the number of pages but to how densely packed with data the document is.

The other matters that come with a decision to return

• Birth certificates for entering children born abroad on the civil register
• Recognition of divorce decrees given by a foreign court
• Inheritance proceedings for property and bank accounts abroad
• Exchange of a driving licence, and vehicle import paperwork
• Medical reports and treatment history records

Each of the matters on this list goes to a different institution, and every institution expects approval in a different form. We have set out which chain applies in which country on the countries page.

The second group, brought by thermal tourism and farming

The province’s thermal facilities and its farming and livestock production give rise to a group of documents entirely unlike the personal ones. Investment in the facilities brings foreign partnership and loan files, while agricultural exports bring product analyses and producer certificates to be translated.

Source of demand	Example document	Language most in evidence
Pension entitlements from abroad	Social security employment record, employer’s letter	German
Family law	Divorce decree, birth certificate	German
Agricultural and food exports	Analysis report, producer certificate	English
Thermal facility investment	Partnership agreement, loan annex	English, German

Pursuing a matter on a relative’s behalf

In most of the pension and inheritance files that come from Balıkesir, the applicant and the person actually handling the matter are not the same. It is very common for a relative in Türkiye to act for a brother or sister living abroad, or for a son or daughter to act for an elderly parent. The first document needed in that case is a power of attorney, and the scope of that power of attorney settles in advance most of the difficulties that follow.

Two points stand out in powers of attorney drawn up abroad. The first is that the powers must be defined broadly enough; one drafted too narrowly can come back at the counter with “there is no authority for this procedure”. The second is that the chain of approvals on the document must be carried across in full. Even where the text is translated correctly, the document is not treated as complete if the endorsement beneath it has been left out.

The same logic holds for death and inheritance documents. If a death record issued abroad is to be used in Türkiye, every note and every code field on the record forms part of the translation. Those fields look technical, but they can be decisive when an estate is divided.

You do not have to travel on behalf of an elderly relative

Pension files are more often pursued by the children or grandchildren of the person concerned than by the owner of the documents. That is what working remotely amounts to in concrete terms in Balıkesir: being able to send the file from home in the district, photographed on a telephone, without stepping outside. The translation and, where required, notarisation are completed We have no branch in Balıkesir. at our office in Ankara, and the wet-signed copy is couriered to the address. If you do not know how many pages there are, that is no obstacle either; upload the file and let us do the page count and the price.

The information here is for general guidance; in a process that runs remotely, the original document may still be required. Settling the form the institution requires at the outset spares you the work of doing it all again later.