Translations for GRO and consular birth registration

Two registrations that need Turkish certificates

The first is registering a birth abroad. If your child was born in Türkiye and either parent is British, you can apply online to have the birth registered with the UK authorities; the fee is £150 for the registration and £50 for each certificate, and the child’s Turkish birth certificate is the central document. Registration is optional, and the child’s citizenship does not depend on it, but it produces a British-style birth certificate that later applications can use. The second is the General Register Office for England and Wales. Where a UK birth entry has to be corrected (a Turkish parent’s name misspelt, a date wrong) or re-registered (to add the father’s details, or after the parents marry), the evidence is often a Turkish certificate or civil registry record. Both bodies read English only.

Registering a UK-born child as a Turkish citizen at the consulate is the mirror image, in the other direction, and is covered in our consular registration guide.

What GOV.UK says about the translation

For registering a birth abroad, GOV.UK states that a foreign birth certificate not in English must be translated, and its wording, quoted in the box, refers to a translator the service accepts. No register of such translators is published and we hold no approval of any kind; what the service checks is the certification on the translation: a statement that it is a true and accurate translation of the original document, the date, and the translator’s or company’s name and contact details. Our certification carries those and the company’s Ankara registry details on every page. For GRO corrections and re-registrations the same certification is what register offices look for, and they work from paper.

Turkish documents that come up

• The child’s birth certificate (doğum belgesi) from the civil registry, or the Formül A multilingual extract, which still needs translating because the UK is not a party to that convention.
• The parents’ marriage certificate (evlenme cüzdanı), needed to show the father’s claim for a child born in Türkiye and for a re-registration after marriage.
• A parent’s nüfus kayıt örneği where the correction concerns that parent’s name, date of birth or maiden name.
• A name-change decision or paternity recognition record where parentage or names changed after the birth.
• A death certificate where a parent has died before the registration.

What goes wrong

• A hospital birth report (doğum raporu) sent instead of the civil registry certificate; only the registry document is a birth certificate.
• A Formül A extract left untranslated because its headings are multilingual.
• The mother’s maiden name (kızlık soyadı), which Turkish records show and UK forms ask for, dropped from the translation.
• The child’s name registered in Türkiye with ç, ş or ğ and entered on the UK form without them, with no note linking the two.
• A re-registration held up because the marriage booklet was translated from its first page only.

How we prepare them

Send scans of every page of each certificate and tell us the spelling of names you are using on the UK form. We translate in full, keep the maiden name and every registrar note, reproduce stamps and seals, and add a translator’s note wherever the Turkish record differs from your chosen spelling. Each page carries the accuracy statement, date, signature, company name, registry number and contact details. For registering a birth abroad you upload the PDF; for a GRO correction or re-registration you will usually need a wet-signed hard copy, which we send by courier from Ankara (£30) or Special Delivery from our UK print partner (£8). A birth certificate and a marriage certificate cost £20 together and take 1–2 working days. No UK VAT is charged. The same translations serve for the child’s first British passport, covered on our HM Passport Office page; the Formül A/B explainer deals with the multilingual extract question in more depth.