Sworn Translation in Manisa

Manisa is one of the main centres of white goods and electronics manufacturing in Türkiye, and that gives the translation requests from the province a distinctly corporate character. The files here mostly belong not to an individual but to an organisation chart: foreign managers working at the production plants of multinational companies, audit teams and correspondence with head office.

One consequence of that corporate character is that requests come at department level rather than from individuals. The person we deal with is not the owner of the document but a specialist in the human resources or the quality unit. That changes what is expected: instead of asking the price of one item at a time, what is sought is a predictable process, a fixed term structure and the option of sending documents in bulk.

The work permit file for foreign staff

The file put together for a foreign manager or specialist assigned to a plant in Türkiye has a fairly standard structure: passport, diploma and professional qualification documents, employment contract, references from previous employers, criminal record certificate and medical report. Most of these documents arrive drawn up in a foreign language and are translated into Turkish; where the family is moving too, the personal records of the spouse and children are added.

The snag met with most often in files of this kind is finding counterparts for professional titles. An engineering or technician title in one country may have no direct counterpart in Türkiye. In such cases, keeping the original and giving an explanation is a safer course than forcing the title into an approximate equivalent.

Product conformity and user documents

In electronics and white goods exports the documentation accompanying the product is inspected as closely as the product itself: declarations of conformity, test reports, energy label information, user manuals and warranty terms. In user manuals the point to watch is that safety warnings are carried across in the settled forms of the target language; these texts are subject to a standard, not to creative translation.

Two languages, two separate needs

In Manisa, English is the language of the internal reporting and policy texts of multinational companies. German comes straight out of ties of capital and technology; the technical correspondence, audit reports and equipment documentation that run with the source country of the production lines are in that language. On the agricultural export side English comes to the fore again. We have set out how we work on high-volume corporate jobs on the services page.

Supplier contracts and non-disclosure agreements

Large production plants work with hundreds of suppliers, and every relationship begins with a contract. The texts that recur most often in the corporate files from Manisa are framework supply contracts, non-disclosure agreements, quality assurance annexes and codes of ethics undertakings. Most of these are standard texts drawn up by head office, translated into Turkish and put before the local supplier for signature.

Being standard does not make the work easier; it creates a pressure for consistency instead. Every copy of a contract going out to a company’s hundred suppliers has to carry the same wording. With corporate clients we therefore manage contract texts through a single approved version and work only on the annexes that change.

In non-disclosure agreements the provisions on scope matter in addition. The definition of confidential information, the term and the exceptions: these three headings have far more consequence than the rest of the text. Neither narrowing nor widening them in translation is what preserves the commercial balance of the contract.

A practical arrangement for the HR unit

We have no branch in Manisa; documents are handled at the office in Ankara. For corporate clients what this means is that the HR unit, instead of repeating the same process at every assignment period, can send documents in bulk through a single channel. The list of terms and titles kept for a given company guarantees consistency in later files. You can send a new assignment file over here and see the page count and the delivery date at the same time.