There is no national roll of sworn legal translators in Türkiye, and no procedure by which a translator swears an affidavit on a particular text. What exists instead is an oath taken once, in advance, before a notary, recorded in a minute that is kept at that one office. A reader abroad who looks for a registration number, or who asks an agency for its certificate of oath, is looking for something Turkish legislation does not create. Three questions do have answers here: who translated, at which office the oath record is held, and what the authority at the other end asks for.
The oath that matters is taken at a notary’s office
Article 96 of the Regulation on the Notaries Law puts two steps before any translation act. The notary has to be satisfied, by seeing a diploma or other documents or in other ways and leaving no room for doubt, that the person translating knows that language or script correctly. The notary then administers the oath under the last paragraph of Article 75 of the Notaries Law, in the form the rules of civil procedure prescribe. Recording the oath in a minute is obligatory, and the minute names the translator, the date of birth, the work address and the home address, the level of education, the languages and the script known, how the notary formed that view, the form of the oath and the date, under the signatures of the notary and the translator. Nothing is sworn again when a particular document arrives.
One office at a time, with a route to another
Those minutes are kept in a special file at the notary’s office, and a notary may not have a person translate whose minute is not in that file. The oath therefore attaches to one office rather than to a province or to the country as a whole. Both the Law and the Regulation provide for the situation this creates: where a translation cannot be procured at the notary’s office in the place where the person concerned is, it may be procured, through that office, at a notary’s office elsewhere. The route exists because the oath itself does not travel. For a file going abroad the consequence is narrow but practical: the identity of the person who translated, and the office holding that person’s minute, are what any later certification rests on.
The lists Turkish law does keep
Turkish legislation is not indifferent to lists; it keeps them for other work. Under Article 202(5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, interpreters are chosen from lists drawn up each year by the provincial judicial justice commissions, and judges and prosecutors may choose from the lists of other provinces as well. Court experts are chosen from a list prepared by the regional expert board on the basis of the judicial districts of the regional courts of appeal (HMK Article 268(1)). A witness who does not speak Turkish is heard through an interpreter (HMK Article 263(1)). Those arrangements concern speaking at a hearing and technical expertise. There is no equivalent annual list for the written translation of documents.
Conventions name a sworn translator; Türkiye names no roll
Instruments drafted elsewhere assume the category exists. Article IV(2) of the New York Convention ties certification of the translation to an official or sworn translator or to a diplomatic or consular agent. The 1954 Hague Convention on civil procedure allows a translation to be certified by a diplomatic or consular agent of the requesting State or by a sworn translator of the State addressed. Read against Turkish law, those words are answered by the notarial oath and by the person who took it, not by an entry in a register. So a request for the translator’s licence number has nothing to point to, while a request naming the translator and the notary’s office has.
The oath covers named languages and a named script
The minute records which language or languages and which script the person knows, and Article 96 defines the act itself as rendering a document from one language into another or from one script into another. Both halves carry weight. Someone sworn for English is not by that fact sworn for French, so a file travelling in two directions can involve two people. The reference to script is not ornamental either: rendering a document written in another script counts as the same kind of act, and the notary’s satisfaction has to extend to it.
What is worth settling before the work starts
Separating the three questions keeps a file out of its commonest dead end, a finished text the destination will not look at. Who translates decides whose identity the certification annotation will carry. Which notary’s office is used decides whether the oath record is in the right file. And the third question belongs to the other end. A sworn translation made in Türkiye is not automatically accepted abroad; some authorities require a translator from their own sworn list. Check with the receiving authority before the translation starts. The certification routes themselves, and the wording each statute uses, are set out in the common questions and cross-border matters sections. Acte Tercüme translates Turkish court and legal documents into English and French with translators whose oath record is held at a notary’s office.