Uzbek documents reach our Istanbul offices with students, workers, spouses and traders, and almost every file raises the same two questions: which alphabet is this document written in, and what happened to the part of the name that looks like a surname. Since 1992 we have prepared Uzbek files for Turkish notaries and public offices with sworn translators.
SWORN UZBEK TRANSLATION IN ISTANBUL
THE SAME PERSON, TWO ALPHABETS
Uzbekistan began moving from the Cyrillic alphabet to a Latin one in the 1990s, and the change has been gradual. The practical result is that one family’s papers are often split: a diploma from 1998 in Cyrillic, a birth certificate in Latin, a passport in a third spelling again.
Turkish offices compare documents letter by letter and read this as three different people. The problem is made worse by the apostrophe letters of the Uzbek Latin alphabet, o’ and g’, which are routinely dropped or replaced by ordinary o and g when a name is typed into a form — so G’ulom becomes Gulom and To’lqin becomes Tolqin.
We take the Latin spelling in your current passport as the anchor for the whole file, reproduce the letters as they are written on each document, and where the two differ we show both so a clerk can see they belong to one person. Turkish letters need the same care in the other direction: Ç, Ğ, İ, Ş and ı are frequently flattened in Uzbek records.
OGLI AND QIZI ARE NOT SURNAMES
Uzbek records may give the father’s name with o’g’li (son of) or qizi (daughter of) attached, and older Soviet-style documents instead carry a Russian patronymic ending in -ovich or -ovna. Neither is a surname, and neither is a middle name in the Western sense.
Turkish civil records have two fields, name and surname. When the patronymic element is dropped into the surname field, the name in the Turkish system stops matching the passport — and every later document inherits the mistake, from the residence card to the title deed.
We show the elements for what they are and keep the passport form as the operative name.
Many Uzbek documents are also issued bilingually in Uzbek and Russian. The two sides can disagree on spelling, and we point out where they do rather than quietly picking one.
APOSTILLE AND SOVIET-ERA PAPERS
The Hague Apostille Convention has been in force for Uzbekistan since 15 April 2012. An apostille obtained there is sufficient and consular legalisation is not required. The apostille goes on the original document, not on the translation.
Certificates and diplomas issued before 1991 are a special case: they were produced under the Soviet Union, usually in Russian, and the apostille has to be obtained from Uzbekistan as the successor state rather than from Moscow. If you are holding an old document and are not sure where it now belongs, send us a photograph and we will tell you.
One more warning worth reading before you spend money: Turkish institutions often require civil status and criminal record documents to be recent. Getting a fresh copy from Tashkent takes time, so ask the Turkish office how old a document it will accept before you order one.
DOCUMENTS WE TRANSLATE MOST OFTEN
- Civil status: birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates, single status letters
- Education: school certificates, diplomas, 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, custody and inheritance papers, title deeds
- Commercial: company registrations, contracts, invoices, transport and customs documents
- Medical: reports and test results for Turkish hospitals
We supply consecutive interpreters for notary, land registry and marriage office appointments — property purchases and marriages require you to attend in person — and simultaneous teams for conferences and trade fairs.
Other languages are listed on our translation languages page.
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