In a cross-border dispute some of the documents produced as evidence come not from a court but from a notary’s office: records establishing the state of a machine, of an apartment, or of what was said at a meeting. Foreign counsel often takes them for expert reports. They are different documents with different bases.
The four findings in the article
Article 61 of Notaries Law No. 1512 groups the notary’s fact-finding competence under four heads: the state and form of a thing or a place; its value; the identity and statements of the persons concerned; and, where invited, attendance at draws, elections and meetings of private organisations, recording the situation. Because four findings sit in one article, very different documents carry the same type of heading. In translation the basis of the finding stays visible in the heading and in the subject line; the word used for the finding is given one consistent equivalent, distinct from the one chosen for court-ordered expert examination.
A value finding is not a valuation
Article 61 allows the notary to establish value, but this finding is neither a licensed valuer’s report nor a court-ordered expert examination: it records what the notary observed. A figure may appear in the document; it is rendered with its currency, without rounding or conversion. For the authority receiving the file, the visibility of this distinction determines how much weight the document carries; no explanatory note is added to the translation, since the distinction follows from the heading and the legal basis stated in the document.
Statements: who is speaking
In records of statements the words of the interested party are reported directly and the text is written in the first person. Person and mood are not changed in translation: turned into indirect speech, the statement reads as the notary’s own. Dates, places and names inside the statement remain unchanged. If the party does not speak Turkish, a sworn interpreter attends the act and that signature appears in the record; the capacities in the signature block are rendered one by one.
The mandatory lines
Article 102 provides that the acts set out in articles 61 and 62 are drawn up in the form of a record, and article 101 fixes its content: the place and date, stated in figures and in words; the identity, address and tax identification number of the interested party; the document proving identity where the party is not known to the notary; the subject matter of the record; and the signature block. The line on the tax identification number entered the article in 1998: an older record does not contain it, and its absence is not a defect. Numbers and the names of identity documents are rendered as they stand, their formats not adapted to local usage.
Where the document sits in the file
A fact-finding record produces no effect by itself: it enters a litigation or enforcement file as evidence. It is therefore often the annex to a pleading and carries an annex number; that number and the reference in the pleading are preserved, and the document is not renumbered. Photographs, sketches or lists attached to it are also translated, captions included, and the annexes are not detached. The translator renders the text; they do not give legal advice, assess the outcome of the document or draft pleadings or contracts. Acte Tercüme translates notarial fact-finding records and their annexes into English.