Sworn Translation in Kırklareli

Kırklareli is a province where sitting next to the border produces a need for translation through investment and production ties rather than through tourist traffic. Businesses that set up a company in Bulgaria, buy raw materials from there, or operate on both sides of the border at once account for a marked share of the enquiries from the province. That means a document profile different from the neighbouring provinces, which deal with crossing papers.

One consequence of this profile is that the enquiries are periodic rather than one-off. Once a business has been set up, it has to draw up the same types of document afresh every year: an up-to-date registry record, up-to-date financial statements, renewed certificates of authority. Most of the files from Kırklareli therefore arrive as a series in which one follows another, and taken as a series they move both faster and more consistently.

Running a company on both sides of the border

Setting up a company abroad, or taking a share in one, begins with personal papers and continues with corporate ones. At the formation stage it is the partners’ identity and address documents, criminal record certificates and powers of attorney that are translated; at the operating stage it is registry records, certificates of authority, financial statements and shareholders’ agreements. In a two-country structure these documents generally move both ways: some are translated from Turkish, some from Bulgarian.

The detail overlooked in these files is whether the company name is to be translated or not. As a rule trade names are not translated but carried across as they stand; the abbreviations denoting legal form, however, may need explaining. Settling that choice at the outset is better than dealing with a registry correction later on.

Farming and industry have papers of their own

The province’s agricultural output and its industrial plants give rise to a separate set of documents on the export side: product specifications, analysis reports, supply contracts, and warranty and installation papers where machinery is imported. English is the dominant language in these documents; Bulgarian is used in cross-border trade itself.

Stage	Document	Direction
Company formation	Criminal record certificate, identity document, power of attorney	Turkish into Bulgarian
Operation	Registry record, certificate of authority	Both ways
Accounting and finance	Balance sheet, income statement, bank letter	Bulgarian into Turkish
Trade	Supply contract, set of invoices	Both ways
Export	Analysis report, product certificate	Turkish into English

The budget question for a small business

Setting up a business across the border is mostly the work of family firms rather than large companies. At that scale the translation budget can turn into a serious line of expenditure. The most practical way to save is to send the documents in one batch rather than piecemeal, and not to ask for notarisation on texts that will not in fact be put before an official body. We publish the per-page tariff and the delivery options openly on the pricing page.

Tax and social security documents on both sides of the border

The heading that businesses operating across the border overlook most often is that of tax and social security documents. A business earning income in two countries at once, or employing staff in both, has to document its position to each side. Tax residence certificates, letters confirming that no tax is owed, insurance records and payslips are translated regularly under this heading.

In these documents the text is short and the data dense. When the equivalents of the deduction items on a payslip, or the period stated in a tax letter, are carried across wrongly, the receiving party cannot make sense of the document and asks for it again. For that reason we tie the names of the items in financial documents to a fixed list and use those same equivalents in the same business’s documents for later periods.

The second frequent problem is the validity period of periodic documents. Tax and social security letters are generally valid only for a short time; a document translated too early may count as expired while the procedure is under way. With documents of this kind it is sounder to have the translation done as close as possible to the date of application.

What working remotely amounts to here

We have no branch in Kırklareli; the process is completed at the office in Ankara and reaches you from there. Running a business in two countries already puts enough miles on you, and there is no need to add a third route for translation. When you send the documents in online, the price and the delivery date appear at once, the electronically signed copy arrives the same day, and the wet-signed copy sets off by courier. If you have document types that recur constantly, templating them once speeds up the transactions that follow appreciably.

The information here summarises the process; the notarisation and apostille steps are completed in Ankara. For definitive information, take the current announcement of the institution concerned as your guide.