Sworn Translation in Bitlis

The small producer’s first step into exporting

The most striking group among the enquiries that reach us from Bitlis is small and medium-sized producers trying to sell abroad for the first time. In a province where farming and tobacco growing predominate, selling produce outside the province is familiar work; taking it across a border, however, calls for an entirely different order of paperwork. All at once the buyer is asking for an analysis report, a certificate of origin, business registration approval and a signed contract. Most of these documents have been drawn up in Turkish, and an official translation is needed before they can be put before the authority on the buyer’s side. For a producer going through this for the first time, the real difficulty is not the translation but knowing which document has to be approved in which form. A good share of the files from Bitlis reach us at exactly that point.

The groups of documents that come from Bitlis

On the production and trade side come analysis reports, business registration certificates, sales contracts, invoices and packing lists. From livestock businesses come veterinary certificates and feed analyses. The second large group is personal: civil registry records, marriage and birth certificates, criminal record certificates, diplomas and academic transcripts. These mostly arise out of matters involving relatives abroad, out of family reunification applications or out of plans to study. A third and smaller group is the recognition and residence paperwork of foreign students at the higher education institution in the province.

The concrete reasons behind the demand for Kurdish, Arabic and Persian

Kurdish is widely used in everyday communication in the province, and the parties ask for correspondence between them, for promotional texts and for some spoken meetings to be conducted in it. The demand for Arabic springs from trade and from migration: the region’s commercial network works closely with the provinces to the south, buyers selling into Middle Eastern markets want the certificates in Arabic, and the administrative papers of families settled in the region have been drawn up in that language. Persian follows from the trade and transport line running along the east of the province; it is needed for consignments going to Iran and in the commercial relationships built with counterparties on that side. All three are asked for because a particular procedure requires them. You can see the forms of approval country by country on the countries page.

When you are putting together a first export file, working through the following in order makes matters easier:

• Get in writing which documents the buyer wants, and settle the list before any translation begins.
• Ask which documents a sworn translation will suffice for and which will need notarisation or an apostille.
• Use the product name in the same form throughout every document.
• Do not leave the payment and delivery terms in the contract open to interpretation.

Keeping to the application timetable

Almost every personal file from Bitlis is tied to a date: a consular appointment, a school application period, the deadline for submitting a family reunification file. The documents are generally completed at the last moment and what is left of the time runs to a few days at most. So the first thing we do when a file reaches us is look for anything missing; a file where translation has begun but the wrong document has been used is the most expensive scenario of all. Once the number of pages and the language pair are known we give the delivery date at the outset, and where there is urgency we order the queue accordingly. With education papers, sending every page of the academic transcript in full is another detail often overlooked.

A process that runs remotely

We have no branch in Bitlis; our office is in Ankara Kızılay. That does not slow anything down, because at no stage do you have to travel. You upload the document online, the fee and the delivery date appear at once, the sworn signature and, where required, notarisation are completed in Ankara, the electronically signed copy reaches your inbox the same day and the wet-signed original arrives at your address by courier. For your first file you can use the quote form, and you can compare the differences between the types of translation on the services page.

The account below is a general framework; what changes from province to province is not the tariff but only the logistics of delivery. Because practice can vary, take the requirement in force at the time of your application as the basis.