Turkish Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Turkish Language

Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and Western Thrace) and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia).

Turkish as an official EU language, even though Turkey is not a member state.

The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia. Erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan, these date back to the second Turk Kaghanate. After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Old Turkic alphabet, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.

With the Turkic expansion during Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries), peoples speaking Turkic languages spread across Central Asia, covering a vast geographical region stretching from Siberia and to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks, in particular, brought their language, Oghuz—the direct ancestor of today's Turkish language—into Anatolia during the 11th century. Also during the 11th century, an early linguist of the Turkic languages, Mahmud al-Kashgari from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, published the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary and map of the geographical distribution of Turkic speakers in the Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (Ottoman Turkish: Divânü Lügati't-Türk).

Turkish Translation Expertise

Turkish is an agglutinative language where suffixes are chained onto root words to express grammatical relationships, meaning a single Turkish word can convey what requires an entire English clause. Vowel harmony governs suffix selection, and the language has no grammatical gender but uses six cases for nouns. Official Turkish documents use a formal register with Ottoman-era Arabic and Persian loanwords that have largely fallen out of everyday use, requiring translators to be versed in both modern and bureaucratic Turkish.

Turkish uses the Latin alphabet adopted in 1928 under Atatürk's language reforms, with 29 letters including ç, ğ (soft g, which lengthens the preceding vowel), ı (dotless i), ö, ş, and ü. The distinction between dotted İ/i and dotless I/ı is critical and frequently causes errors in digital processing and translation.

Common Turkish Documents

Commonly translated documents include doğum belgesi (birth certificates), nüfus kayıt örneği (family register extracts), evlilik cüzdanı (marriage booklets), criminal record certificates from the e-Devlet system, and academic diplomas from Turkish universities.

NAATI offers certification for Turkish translators, and there is a reasonable pool of certified practitioners in Australia. NAATI-certified Turkish translations are accepted by Australian immigration, educational, and legal authorities.

About the Turkish Language

Turkish underwent one of the most dramatic alphabet changes in history when Atatürk replaced the Arabic script with a modified Latin alphabet in 1928, giving the entire nation just three months to learn the new system. As an agglutinative language, Turkish can express in a single word what requires an entire English sentence — the word "Avustralyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına" (meaning "as if you are one of those whom we could not make into an Australian") is grammatically valid. Turkish also has complete vowel harmony, where all vowels in a word must belong to the same harmonic class.