Chinese work divides into two streams in our offices: the contracts, customs papers and technical documentation of companies importing from China, and the personal files of students, spouses and employees who need Chinese documents recognised in Turkey. The rules for the second stream changed recently, and a lot of advice still circulating is out of date. We have been handling Chinese files with sworn translators since 1992.
SWORN CHINESE TRANSLATION IN ISTANBUL
CHINA JOINED THE APOSTILLE SYSTEM ONLY IN 2023
The Hague Apostille Convention entered into force for the People’s Republic of China on 7 November 2023. Before that date every Chinese document destined for Turkey had to go through consular legalisation.
Two practical consequences follow. Documents certified from that date onward need only an apostille, issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or by an authorised provincial foreign affairs office. Documents certified earlier carry the old legalisation stamps and are still perfectly valid — nobody needs to have them redone.
Hong Kong and Macao are a separate story: the Convention has applied to both for far longer than to the mainland, and each issues its own apostilles through its own authority. Documents from Taiwan fall outside the Convention entirely and follow a different certification route.
If you are unsure which applies to your paper, send us a photograph before you pay for anything.
MOST CHINESE CIVIL DOCUMENTS ARE NOTARIAL CERTIFICATES
People often ask us for a translation of “my Chinese birth certificate” and then send something quite different: a notarial certificate issued by a Chinese notary public office, restating the facts held in the household register.
That is normal. For use abroad, Chinese civil facts — birth, marriage, single status, criminal record, kinship — are usually packaged as notarial certificates, often printed with a Chinese page and an English page facing each other.
A bilingual booklet is not a licence to skip the sworn translation. The English page in it was not produced by a translator sworn before a Turkish notary, so Turkish offices do not accept it on its own. We translate the Chinese page, note what the accompanying English page says, and flag any place where the two do not agree — which happens more often than you would expect, usually in names and dates.
The household register (hukou) is a separate document again, and where a Turkish office asks for family details it is frequently the one they actually want.
SURNAME FIRST, AND TWO DIFFERENT SETS OF CHARACTERS
Chinese names put the family name first: in Wang Xiaoming, Wang is the surname. Turkish forms expect the opposite order, and a name entered the wrong way round at the start of a residence file follows the holder through every document that comes afterwards.
Romanisation adds another layer. Mainland documents use Pinyin, while older records and papers from Taiwan and Hong Kong may use Wade-Giles or Cantonese spellings, so the same family name appears as Zhang or Chang, Zhou or Chou. We anchor the spelling to the passport and keep it identical across the file.
The writing systems differ too: the mainland uses simplified characters, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao traditional ones. Our translators work with both and we tell you which you are holding if you are not sure.
DOCUMENTS WE TRANSLATE MOST OFTEN
- Civil status: notarial certificates of birth, marriage, single status and kinship, household register pages
- Education: diplomas, degree certificates, transcripts, course descriptions, recognition (denklik) files
- Official: passports, identity cards, driving licences, police certificates, residence and work permit dossiers
- Legal: powers of attorney, court judgments, notarial deeds, contracts
- Commercial: business licences, articles of association, agency and distribution agreements, invoices, packing lists, bills of lading and customs papers
- Technical: machine and electronics manuals, test and conformity reports, patents, product specifications
For importers we build a per-company glossary so that product names and specifications stay consistent from one shipment to the next. Consecutive interpreters are available for notary, land registry and factory meetings, and simultaneous teams for conferences and trade fairs.
Other languages are listed on our translation languages page.
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