Sworn Translation in Bursa

Most of the translation enquiries that reach us from Bursa lead back to a single chain: the automotive supply industry. A plant that supplies parts to a European manufacturer has to deliver not only the part but the stack of paperwork standing behind it. In Bursa that stack runs to a far greater volume than personal documents do, and we have built this page on that fact.

The practical consequence is this: work from Bursa runs to a high page count, but the rate of repetition is high as well. The procedure a plant sent us a year ago largely overlaps with the one it works to today. Set up properly, that pattern becomes an advantage that brings the cost down markedly; set up badly, it means the same texts are translated from scratch at every audit.

Being a supplier means producing paperwork alongside the product

Main manufacturers audit their suppliers at regular intervals. The file called for ahead of an audit usually consists of the quality manual, the process flow chart, measurement and calibration records, declarations of material conformity and corrective action reports. The Turkish originals of these documents already exist; what is missing is their counterpart in a language the auditor can read. In machinery exports, the technical file, the user manual and the declaration of conformity are all asked for at the same time.

The critical matter in work of this kind is consistency of terminology. If the same measurement term appears in two documents under two different renderings, you will find yourself explaining it during the audit. On files from Bursa we have made it standard practice to keep a term list specific to the company and to use that same list on every job that follows.

German is here because of trade, not tourism

The weight of demand for German in Bursa comes from the direct supply relationship with the German automotive and machinery industries. English may be the common working language much of the time, yet technical specifications and warranty texts are required in the language the contract was originally drawn up in. Arabic, for its part, comes to the fore in machinery and furniture sales to the region and in dealership and authorisation certificates. You will find the full set of language pairs and the tariff on the languages page.

Industrial document	Who it is prepared for	Language usually required
Quality manual, process documentation	Auditor from the main manufacturer	German, English
Material conformity and test report	Customer’s quality department	German
Machine user manual, technical file	Export buyer	English, Arabic
Dealership and authorisation certificate	Distributor abroad	Arabic
Company registry record and signature circular	Tender or bank file	English

Preparing in step with the audit calendar

Supplier audits cluster into particular periods of the year, and the date is usually given weeks in advance. Even so, most files are only started in the final week, because on the quality department’s agenda translation queues up behind production. Yet a good part of the text needing translation in an audit file has not changed at all since the previous audit.

For that reason the method we recommend to manufacturers in Bursa is to take the file not as a whole but through the difference between revisions. Once you separate out the procedures that have changed and the records that have been updated, the volume to be translated often falls to a quarter of the total. The cost comes down, and the risk of taking delivery a day before the audit rather than a week before it disappears.

The second gain, and the one less often noticed, is keeping track of revision numbers. If it is unclear which Turkish version the translation put before the auditor belongs to, a single question will oblige you to explain yourself. Carrying the version details of the documents across into the translation closes that discussion before it opens.

A day away from Ankara, but you need not make the journey

Bursa is generally a single day from Ankara by courier. Even so, the real gain lies not in the courier time but in the process itself: the hundreds of pages of a technical file are not moved physically, they travel digitally. A wet-signed copy is needed only for those items that will go before an official body; for most audit files an electronically signed copy is enough. Drawing that distinction at the outset eases both the budget and the timetable.

We have no branch in Bursa; the whole of the procedure is completed at the office in Ankara. Here that carries a particular meaning: an audit file running to hundreds of pages is not moved physically in any case, it travels digitally, so turning up at an office door would not speed anything up. Since a wet-signed copy is called for only on those items that will go before an official body, your quality department’s audit calendar does not slip on account of the translation.

Work outside industry

• Social security employment records and reference letters for engineers and technicians working abroad
• Powers of attorney and partnership agreements at companies with foreign shareholders
• Sample and label information texts in textile exports
• University and vocational school documents, and correspondence about work placements

Whether your file is a single page or a thousand-page technical set, the process starts in the same place: upload the document and the page count and the price come out at once. For corporate work, sending files in bulk and keeping a fixed term list, you can look at the services page.