Names, Turkish characters and transliteration

The seven letters that cause the trouble

Turkish uses the Latin alphabet with seven letters that English does not: ç, ş, ğ, ı (dotless i), İ (capital dotted i), ö and ü. It also lacks q, w and x. When a Turkish name passes through a UK system that cannot handle the diacritics, the result is a spelling that looks different from the one on the Turkish document: Şule becomes Sule, Çağlar becomes Caglar, Işık becomes Isik or, worse, Işik. Multiply that across a birth certificate, a passport, a marriage record and a tenancy agreement, and a caseworker can be looking at four spellings of one person.

How your passport writes your name

A Turkish passport shows your name twice. The visual zone prints it with its Turkish letters. The machine-readable zone at the bottom uses only the 26 ASCII letters, following the ICAO standard, so diacritics are stripped: ÖZTÜRK becomes OZTURK, ŞİMŞEK becomes SIMSEK. UK bodies usually key your name from the machine-readable zone or from your visa, which is why your UK records tend to carry the stripped spelling. Neither spelling is wrong. They are the same name in two encodings.

What we do in the translation

• We reproduce names exactly as the source document spells them, Turkish letters included. A translation is a rendering of the document, and the name on it is a fact of the document.
• We never anglicise a name. Mehmet does not become Mohammed; Yusuf does not become Joseph.
• We do not translate surnames that happen to be words. Demir stays Demir, not Iron.
• Where your passport or UK records use a diacritic-free spelling, we add a translator's note in square brackets at first occurrence, for example “Şule Çağlar [passport spelling: Sule Caglar]”. Tell us the spelling you use in the UK when you order.
• Capital İ and lowercase ı are preserved; ISTANBUL in capitals on a stamp becomes İstanbul in the translation only where the source uses it that way.
• Place names follow established English forms where they exist (Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir) and keep the Turkish form otherwise (Çankaya, Şişli, Kadıköy).

Q, W and X in Turkish records

Because these letters are not part of the Turkish alphabet, civil-registry records have traditionally not used them, and names with these letters (Kurdish names, foreign spouses' names) were registered with substitutes: Q as K, W as V, X as KS. The London Consulate's birth-registration note says that names containing Q, W or X are adapted when a UK-born child is registered. The practical effect is that a child called Xavier on a UK birth certificate may appear as Ksavier on the Turkish record, and a parent named Wael as Vael. In the translation we reproduce each document's spelling and note the relationship, so that both records can be matched. If you are registering a birth at the consulate, ask about the current practice before choosing a name; see registering a UK birth at the Turkish Consulate.

Keeping your name consistent

1. Decide which spelling is your “UK spelling”, normally the machine-readable zone of your passport, and use it on every UK form.
2. Tell us that spelling when you order, so the translator's note can cross-reference it.
3. If a UK record already uses a different spelling (a bank account under Sule, a payslip under Şule), do not open a new account; a translation with the note is normally enough to link them.
4. If a Turkish record contains a genuine error, not a transliteration difference, it has to be corrected at the nüfus müdürlüğü or by court decision. We translate what the record says and can add a note that a correction is in progress; we do not correct it in the translation. See Turkish name-change decision translation.

Try the spelling helper

Our Turkish name spelling helper shows how a name is written with Turkish letters, in the passport machine-readable form, and in the common UK variants, so you can check which forms exist across your documents before you apply for anything.