Sworn Translation in Hatay

In Hatay, translation is a natural part of the goods and the money moving between the two sides of the border. With a land border crossing, a port and the iron and steel and food industries all in one place, most of the files that reach us from the province consist of customs and foreign trade paperwork. This page takes up the documentary side of border trade.

What sets Hatay apart in translation terms is tempo rather than volume. The documents are small but they arrive often; one file is not closed before the next is opened. The only way to work at that tempo is to stop treating every consignment as though it were the first. Once the document structure of a particular exporter has been recognised, there is no need to go on asking questions about the files that follow.

The paperwork of freight crossing the land border

In road haulage running through Cilvegözü, the paperwork proceeds on a different logic from sea freight: the cargo moves in smaller lots, more often and over shorter periods. That means a large number of documents, each of only a few pages, have to be translated quickly. Transport documents, commercial invoices, declarations of origin, packing lists and the letters of authorisation demanded by the buyer on the other side are the items that come in most frequently.

What helps most at this tempo is standardisation. When the document structure an exporter sends with every consignment is the same, only the fields that change need work, and the delivery time is cut substantially.

Files on the port and industry side

In iron and steel production the product documents form a category of their own: material inspection and test certificates, chemical composition analyses, declarations of conformity to standards. These documents hold tables and numerical data rather than prose; in translating them our priority is to keep the data intact. On the food export side it is analysis reports, production permits and label texts that circulate.

Channel	Document density	Usual language
Land border trade	Many documents, few pages each	Arabic
Port exports	Moderate in number, moderate in volume	English
Iron and steel	Few in number, dense with data	English
Food industry	Regular and repeating	Arabic, English
Personal matters	Variable	Arabic
Construction and supply	Bulky, weighted towards legal text	English, Arabic
Building material documents	Dense with standard codes	English

Arabic is a working language here

Demand for Arabic in Hatay is not confined to one type of document, as it tends to be in other provinces; it turns up in every category, from commercial contracts to civil registry records, from authorisation certificates to court judgments. That breadth calls for particular care over terminology: the terms of commercial law and those of family law are very different fields even within a single language. English, for its part, is the language of the port and of international shipping. The language pairs we work in and the tariff are on the languages page.

The period when construction and supply contracts build up

Construction, infrastructure and supply activity in Hatay has grown considerably in recent years, and the traffic in contracts has grown with it. Firms sourcing materials, equipment and prefabricated structures from abroad find themselves obliged to have purchase contracts, technical specifications, certificates of conformity and carriage agreements translated. Unlike the fast tempo of border trade, these files are bulkier and more legal in character.

Product documents for building materials are a heading of their own: declarations of performance, test reports and certificates of conformity to standards. In these documents the standard numbers and classification codes are kept exactly as they are and not translated. Carrying a code across unchanged, rather than “explaining” it, is what keeps the document verifiable at the inspection stage.

In projects funded by donations and aid, reporting texts come into play: expenditure breakdowns, progress reports and audit correspondence. In these texts, carrying the numerical data and the period details across exactly is a precondition of the report being accepted.

How the distance is made up for

Hatay is one of the provinces far from Ankara; a wet-signed copy generally reaches you by courier in two to three working days. Against that, on the great majority of foreign trade paperwork the buyer and the customs broker work from a digital copy, so an electronically signed copy can be used the same day. Courier time is decisive only where a document has to be presented physically to an official body. If your shipping schedule is settled, it is enough to send us the file in advance; we have no branch in the province, and the process is completed at the office in Ankara.

This page is intended as general information; our office is based in Ankara Kızılay and there is no branch in any other province. It would be wise to check the current requirements with an official source.