Translations for asylum and humanitarian protection claims

How documents enter a protection claim

A claim for asylum or humanitarian protection begins with a screening interview and continues with a substantive interview, at which the Home Office provides its own interpreter. Alongside your account, your representative may submit documents that corroborate it. For people from Türkiye these often come from the justice system: a court judgment (mahkeme kararı), an indictment (iddianame), a detention or arrest warrant (yakalama or tutuklama kararı), a court summons (tebligat), custody and search records (gözaltı ve arama tutanakları), prosecutor’s files printed from UYAP, and records of party, association or union membership. Medical reports documenting injuries, press articles and social media posts appear too. Anything not in English must be translated before a caseworker or a tribunal judge can read it, and if the claim is refused and appealed, the translations become part of the tribunal bundle.

We translate; we do not advise on the claim itself. Asylum law is a specialist field and legal aid may be available, so work with a solicitor or an adviser regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority (formerly OISC), and let them decide which documents to submit.

What the Home Office and the tribunal expect from a translation

The Home Office standard is the GOV.UK certification wording quoted in the box: written confirmation that the translation is a true and accurate translation of the original document, the date, and the translator’s or company’s name and contact details. The First-tier Tribunal’s directions in immigration and asylum appeals ask, in summary, for any document not in English to be accompanied by a certified translation in the bundle. Our certification, with the signatory’s name, the company’s details and the date on every page, is designed for both readers, and we paginate to your representative’s index when asked.

How we handle court and evidence documents

• Everything is translated in full: a judgment from the case number to the last signature, not just the operative part. Where your representative wants only an extract, the translation says so and identifies the pages.
• Turkish legal terms are rendered precisely and kept in brackets, because distinctions matter: gözaltı (police custody) is not tutuklama (remand in custody); a suspended pronouncement of judgment (hükmün açıklanmasının geri bırakılması) is not an acquittal; a finality note (kesinleşme şerhi) changes the meaning of a decision.
• UYAP verification codes, court seals, barcodes and handwritten annotations are reproduced, and illegible words are marked as illegible rather than guessed.
• Documents in Kurdish are handled through our Kurdish translation team.
• Medical and psychological reports are translated by translators who work on medical records, with terminology a UK clinician will recognise; see medical translation.

Problems we see in protection files

• Only the ruling of a thirty-page judgment translated, so the reasoning that supports the claim is missing.
• Custody and remand confused, undermining the chronology in the witness statement.
• Documents translated by a friend or relative, which the Home Office does not treat as independently verifiable.
• Dates in Turkish day-month-year order copied into English without care, shifting events by months.
• The claimant’s name spelt three ways across police, court and medical records with no note reconciling them.
• Screenshots translated without the account name, date and platform visible, so the post cannot be attributed.

Confidentiality, interpreting and cost

We never contact a Turkish authority, court or any third party to verify a document, and we do not comment on authenticity. Files are shared only with the translator and reviser working on them, transferred over encrypted channels and deleted after the retention period in our confidentiality and data protection page. For solicitors we provide itemised page counts and invoices in the format legal aid claims need. We also provide telephone and video interpreting for meetings with your representative, statement-taking and medical-legal appointments; we do not interpret at Home Office interviews, where the interpreter is supplied by the Home Office. Translation is charged from £10.00 per page; a ten-page judgment is about £100 and takes 2–3 working days, longer bundles 3–5 working days, with express service available when a tribunal deadline is close. No UK VAT is charged.