Sworn Translation in İstanbul

What sets the translation work reaching us from İstanbul apart from other provinces is not the type of document but its timetable. A patient’s discharge summary, an annex to a textile exporter’s letter of credit and an undergraduate’s transcript can land on the same desk in the same week; the sheer range of business in the city makes any single definition of an “İstanbul document” impossible. The common denominator is this: almost every one of them has to meet a date the other side fixed long in advance.

Another İstanbul trait is one person running several processes at once. A company partner may be putting together registry papers for a tender abroad while also having a transcript translated for a child’s school enrolment. The two go to different institutions, call for different chains of approval and answer to different timetables. Running them all under a single label of “urgent” means that what is genuinely urgent falls behind. Separating the files and giving each its own deadline is the arrangement that works best in this city.

The delay comes not from the translation but from the moment of joining the queue

In matters handled abroad the date is generally set by the other side: an application appointment, a tender deadline, a school enrolment window. Because the traffic at foreign missions and application centres in İstanbul is heavy, applicants often notice the last item on the list of papers, the translation, only a few days before the appointment. Confirming which institution requires which approval from that institution’s own official announcement is therefore the first step; the second is not to sit on the answer once you have it.

Our own response to this is to break the file up. A five-page set of diplomas and a thirty-page company articles of association do not have to move as a single job. Separating out the item that is genuinely urgent and completing that first is the method we resort to most often on files from İstanbul.

The groups of documents that leave the city

The table below sets out the headings that recur in enquiries originating in İstanbul and why they are sensitive to timing. Per-page rates vary with the language pair; you can see the current list on the pricing page.

Document set	Why timing matters	When to start
Personal papers (civil registry, marriage, criminal record)	The application appointment date is fixed	As soon as the appointment is booked
Educational documents (diploma, transcript, course descriptions)	The enrolment window runs to a few weeks only	When the offer letter arrives
Commercial papers (contract, authorisation certificate, invoice set)	Tied to the shipping or payment schedule	Before the agreement is signed
Medical file (discharge summary, test results, report)	The travel plans of the patient or the companion	Before the flight is booked

The reasons behind languages other than English in İstanbul

Demand for German in İstanbul comes from two directions: the civil registry, inheritance and property matters in Türkiye of families living in Germany, and technical correspondence on the industrial side. Arabic appears both in the contracts and authorisation certificates of trade with countries in the region and in the personal papers of the population settled in the city. Russian comes up in export and logistics correspondence as well as in company formation files, while French clusters in the contracts of corporate clients opening up to Francophone markets. We have gathered together which country asks for which chain of approval on the countries page.

The three warnings we give most often on İstanbul files

The first concerns which copy of the document is to be used. Some institutions accept the original, some the electronically produced printout with a QR code, and some a notarised copy. A translation begun from the wrong copy may have to be done again halfway through the procedure. That is why we ask which copy is to be taken as the basis before we lay a hand on the file.

The second is the order in which the apostille is obtained. The apostille certificate is placed on the original document and, as a rule, has to be obtained before the translation. When the certificate is added afterwards the translation is left incomplete, since the certificate itself then remains untranslated; the file comes back and the process begins again. The loss of time we meet most often on files from İstanbul arises from precisely this error of sequence.

The third is the spelling of names. The Latin-alphabet spelling in the passport is not always the same as the spelling in the civil registry record, and which of the two will be used has to be decided at the outset and held to throughout the application. What the three warnings have in common is this: all of them are problems that can be settled in a few minutes before the translation begins, and only by doing the work over again once it has.

What staying out of the traffic amounts to in İstanbul

Our office is in Ankara Kızılay; we have no representative office in İstanbul. In İstanbul’s case, though, that is no disadvantage, because the time lost between two districts within the city is often longer than the distance between us and Ankara. Photographing a document and sending it takes a few minutes; the electronically signed copy is in your hands the same day, and the wet-signed original sets off by courier. If you are not sure which approval your matter requires, we suggest you upload your document and clarify the position first; an unnecessary notarisation can cost you as dearly as a missed appointment.

This content describes the typical flow; how long a matter takes depends on the volume of the document and the delivery speed chosen. For definitive information, rely on the current announcement of the institution concerned.