Sworn Translation in Tekirdağ

What makes Tekirdağ interesting from a translation point of view is that two quite different kinds of demand overlap in the same province. On one side there is the commercial paperwork of the logistics corridor opening onto Europe; on the other, the personal documents of families of Balkan origin, reaching back generations. However different these two kinds of text may be, they share a common difficulty: records that are old, worn or written in another alphabet.

Because these two demands meet in the same province, our own way of working splits in two as well. In commercial paperwork speed is what decides; in family and civil registry files it is accuracy. In the first, days matter; in the second, letters. That is why, when we open a file from Tekirdağ, our first question is which of the two groups it belongs to, since the two call for the same care but with different priorities.

Applications that rest on family history

Many families living in Thrace have roots reaching into the Balkans, and from time to time that ancestry turns into an official procedure: a search into ownership, a citizenship application, an inheritance file. In work of this kind the documents to be translated are usually not current ones but historical ones. Civil registry records kept in the Cyrillic alphabet, handwritten birth records and old title deed copies are the typical examples in this group.

In a document of that sort the greatest risk is the spelling of names. When the same person’s name appears with different letters in two documents, the procedure can be refused at the outset. For that reason, with family files from Tekirdağ we agree before the work begins on the spelling in which personal names are to be fixed. A wrong choice can be put right afterwards, but the cost of it is a fresh round of application.

Where Bulgarian stands in Tekirdağ

Demand for Bulgarian here is fed from two sources. The first is the family and civil registry files described above. The second is the road haulage and cross-border trade running through Bulgaria: carriage contracts, damage reports, vehicle and driving documents. English and German, for their part, come from the correspondence the province’s textile and food industries carry on with European buyers. You can see the rate for the language pair you need on the languages page.

Procedure	Document often translated	Common language
Family and inheritance file abroad	Civil registry record, birth and marriage record, certificate of inheritance	Bulgarian
Road haulage	Carriage contract, damage report, driving licence	Bulgarian, English
Food and textile exports	Analysis report, product specification	English, German
Company procedures	Registry record, power of attorney, declaration of signature	Bulgarian, English

With an old document you have to read first and translate afterwards

With a worn record the work is reading before it is translating. If the photograph of your document is blurred, or the date on the seal cannot be made out, we tell you so before starting; asking for a better copy of the document is always cheaper than guessing at a passage that cannot be read. This preliminary check is free of charge and is carried out when you upload the document.

Original, copy and extract: which one is translated

There is a confusion that comes up often in work with historical records: is the document in your hands the original, a certified copy, or an extract taken from an archive? These three are different things, and foreign authorities expect different things of them. For some procedures only a recently dated extract obtained from the relevant archive is accepted; the fifty-year-old original in your hands, however well preserved it may be, can be held insufficient.

On the translation side the consequence of this is that every entry, seal and annotation on the document is carried across. When a stamp of approval on the reverse or a note of correction in the margin is left out, the translation ceases to be the full counterpart of the document. That is why, with family files from Tekirdağ, we ask for both sides of the document to be sent.

A third detail is the system of dating. In old records it is possible to come across dates written according to different calendars. These dates are not converted; the record’s own form is kept and, where necessary, a note of explanation is added. To convert them would mean interpreting an official document, and that goes beyond the limits of sworn translation.

The part that runs without leaving the province

We have no branch in Tekirdağ; the whole of the work is completed at the office in Ankara. In practice this means you do not have to travel to another province to have a historical civil registry record translated. You scan the document and send it, the electronically signed copy is in your hands the same day, and the wet-signed copy to be submitted to the official authority arrives by courier. In family files, documents belonging to several generations often arrive together; gathering these into a single job is more efficient in cost and in timing alike.

This page is for guidance; courier times may vary with distance and with the carrier’s schedule. Confirming the current requirement before you apply saves time.