A bilingual review is a comparative reading of a finished translation against the document it was made from, and what it produces is a report of divergences rather than a new certified text. The distinction matters more than it sounds. In Turkish law the oath and the certification attach to the person who rendered the text and signed it; reading someone else’s work afterwards transfers neither, and a review that ended in a signature would be a fresh translation under another name.
What a comparative reading can establish
Most of what goes wrong in a legal translation is visible only with both texts open. A sheet missing from the middle of a set. An annotation written on the reverse of the last page and therefore never scanned. A stamp or a seal present in the source and absent from the rendering. The same procedural term rendered two ways inside one document. A figure differing by a digit, or a date that has changed shape. A review lists each of these with the page and the line it sits on, so that the person running the file can see how much of the text is affected before deciding what to do.
What it cannot establish
A review says nothing about whether the destination will take the text. The rule of acceptance lives in the receiving authority’s own regulation, and no amount of reading the two languages side by side can supply it. Nor does a review sit in judgment on the source: clerical and arithmetical errors in a judgment are corrected by the court itself, of its own motion or on a party’s application, and where the judgment has already been served the judge may not correct it without hearing the parties (HMK Article 304(1)). A divergence between source and rendering is reported; a defect in the source is reported to whoever can act on it.
Why a reviewer does not sign another person’s translation
Under the Regulation on the Notaries Law a notary may not have a person translate whose oath minute is not in that office’s file, and under Article 103 of the Notaries Law the annotation given below a translated text carries the identity and address of the translator the notary used. Both provisions point at one person, the one who produced the text. A second reader does not enter that annotation and cannot be added to it. So a review results in a report on an existing text, and where the divergences reach the operative part or the figures the honest answer is a new rendering signed by whoever makes it, rather than a patched text with two authors and one signature.
The route a court gives a party who doubts a translation
HMK Article 223(1) puts the obligation to file a translation on the party relying on a document written in a foreign language. The second paragraph then gives the court a power: of its own motion or on the application of the other party, it may also ask for an official translation of the document, an expression the Code does not define. A party thinking about that application needs something concrete to put into it. A comparative reading is what turns the impression that the opponent’s text reads oddly into a list of identified points, and it is equally useful when it shows there is nothing to raise.
Reviewing a rendering of a Turkish document going out
In the other direction the reader is usually an authority abroad, and part of what it looks at is formal rather than textual: whether the language of the translation is stated, whether every page carries the translator’s signature, whether the statement of accuracy stands in the language of the translation. A review covers those elements alongside the wording, because a rendering can be faithful and still be handed back. Which elements those are is set out in this section’s page on what an authority reads before accepting a text.
Which copy the review was made from
A review reads the rendering against the copy it was made from, so the report names that copy. Two questions then sit outside it. Article 224(1) makes the official character in Türkiye of documents prepared by foreign State authorities depend on approval by the competent authority of the issuing State or by the relevant Turkish consular authority; that approval attaches to the original and cannot be repaired by anything done to the translation. And where the rendering was made from a photocopy, the Union of Turkish Notaries keeps the attachment named in MÖHUK Article 53(a) outside the concession that allows translation from a photocopy, which makes the choice of copy a finding rather than a footnote. Acte Tercüme translates court and legal documents between Turkish, English and French and reads an existing translation against its source, reporting divergences in a separate note.