Turkish: Translation & simultaneous interpreting

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and Cyprus. It is further acknowledged as a minority language in Kosovo, North Macedonia and Romania. There are approx. 70 million native Turkish speakers, most of whom live in Turkey, Cyprus and neighbouring countries.

Turkish is, just like Azerbaijani and Turkem, part of the Oghuz branch of Turkic languages and is the most common of this group.

There are six different dialects in Turkey: Black Sea region, East, Southeast and Central Anatolia, Aegean and Istanbul. The Istanbul dialect is the most important one as the Turkish standard language is based on it or rather on its phonetics. There can be small but also big differences between the dialects and the country-specific variants. The Turkish translator or interpreter has to know these differences and translate them correctly to avoid misunderstandings. This is why we always recommend to commission an experienced and competent language expert with the translation of your documents or with your interpreting project. The Nuremberg interpreting and translation agency AP Fachübersetzungen works exclusively with certified and experienced Turkish translators and interpreters and can thus guarantee the high quality and accuracy of your translation. Whether you need a consecutive, telephone, whisper, trade fair, simultaneous, court, liaison or conference interpreter or a specialist translator for Turkish - you can always rely on our translation agency.

The land of modern Turkey was inhabited by tribal communities since the Neolithic period. Old Turkic monuments are the oldest artefacts, indicating the existence of a written language in Turkey. These are stone plates on which the Old Turkic alphabet was inscribed, and represent the early written version of the Old Turkic language.

Turkic tribes migrated to Turkey from Central Asia and developed and spread the Old Turkic language. The language which is spoken in Turkey today, however, is not a direct descendant of the ancient Turkic language. The Old Turkic language was one of the South-Eastern Turkic languages while modern Turkish is assigned to the South-Western group of the Turkic languages. Turkish is said to have covered much of Central Asia and to have been spread throughout the region by the migratory tribes.

Between the 6^th and 11^th century, Turk tribes settled on the territory of modern Turkey. Oguz Turks were the first known tribes that arrived in the territory and developed a long-lasting culture in Turkey. Before the arrival of Oguz Turks, many different tribes had lived in the region.

The Latin alphabet was only introduced for the Turkish language in 1928 and replaced the Arabic one, which had been used until then. The written language is based on the Istanbul dialect, by the way.

The modern Turkish language uses the Latin alphabet as well as some additional special characters and consists of 29 letters. A sound is assigned to every letter, which is why the Turkish pronunciation is very regular.

The topology can in part significantly differ from those of other languages because in a Turkish sentence, for instance, the verb is at the end. This structure is rather unusual for a German or English native speaker.

Turkish is one of the agglutinating languages, which means that the grammatical form (for example indicating possession or place) is shown by the suffix of the words. In most Indo-European languages, however, this is shown by a possessive pronoun or preposition which comes before the reference word. In the Turkish language, there are neither prepositions nor articles nor genders.

The tenses are also different from the German system. While the Turkish tense system is not as strongly based on the division into perfect, present and future, Turkish tenses also fulfil modal and aspect-related functions. In this way, a small number of basic forms can form an endless number of further tenses when combined with auxiliary verbs. The differences between those tenses are often only slight nuances and translating them into German (or English, for that matter) can thus be troublesome sometimes.

Turkish flexion is also different from the German one. In German, there are four cases while in Turkish there are six. In addition, there are other outdated case formations that are used in the Turkish language, e.g. in idioms.

The Turkish vocabulary has borrowed many words from Arabic, Persian and French, but also some words from German.

Because of all these peculiarities of the Turkish language, we recommend to commission a native speaker or a very experienced language expert with the translation of your documents or your interpreting job. This is why we at AP Fachübersetzungen exclusively work with translators and interpreters who fulfil our high quality standards, have many years of experience and excellent qualifications. Certified translations are also only carried out by qualified and sworn specialist translators. With us, your translation and interpreting projects are always in the best of hands.