Translations for probate

Turkish documents in an English estate

Probate is the process by which the court authorises someone to deal with a deceased person’s estate, through a grant of probate where there is a will or letters of administration where there is not. Turkish documents enter it in three ways. The deceased may have made a will in Türkiye, usually a notarial will (düzenleme şeklinde vasiyetname), which must be produced with the application for an English grant. The deceased may have died in Türkiye, so the death is evidenced by a Turkish death certificate or an ölüm kayıt örneği. Or the estate may include Turkish assets and Turkish heirs, in which case a certificate of inheritance (veraset ilamı) issued by a Turkish court or notary shows who the heirs are under Turkish law, and the tapu and Turkish bank statements go into the inheritance tax return. Sometimes all three happen at once.

What the probate registry requires

The application form for a grant where there is a will, PA1P, and its guidance deal with foreign wills: the original foreign-language will is lodged and an English translation must accompany it. We have summarised rather than quoted the form’s wording in the box. Where the deceased held a grant abroad, the registry can reseal certain foreign grants, but resealing is limited to grants from specified Commonwealth countries and territories; Türkiye is not among them, so a Turkish veraset ilamı cannot be resealed and a fresh English grant is needed, with the Turkish document translated as evidence. Registries also ask for an affidavit or witness statement of foreign law where the validity of a Turkish will is in question, and the translator’s certificate on the translation of the will is what makes it admissible. Some registries request an apostille on Turkish public documents; where they do, we obtain it in Ankara.

Turkish documents that come up

• A Turkish will (vasiyetname), notarial or handwritten, with the notary’s certificate and any court opening record.
• A death certificate (ölüm belgesi) or the multilingual Formül C extract, which still needs translating for UK use.
• A certificate of inheritance (veraset ilamı) naming heirs and shares.
• A nüfus kayıt örneği proving family relationships where the will refers to relatives by kinship.
• Tapu, valuation reports and bank statements for the inheritance tax forms.

Common reasons probate applications are delayed

• The will is translated but the notary’s certificate, the witness clause and the registration annotations are not, so the registry cannot see how it was executed.
• Heirs’ shares in the veraset ilamı are expressed as fractions of 24 or 48 under Turkish practice and are rewritten as percentages in the translation, which invites a query; we keep the fractions and explain them once.
• Names differ across generations because Turkish characters were dropped, and the registry cannot link the heir to the deceased.
• The Turkish document is a copy rather than a certified extract, and the registry asks for the original or an apostilled copy.
• Inheritance tax values are converted in the translation rather than reported in lira for the executor to convert.

How we prepare probate documents

Legal translators with succession-law experience translate; a second linguist checks names, dates, shares and asset descriptions. Wills are translated in full with every notarial clause and stamp. Each page carries our certification statement with the company’s Ankara registry details, the date, stamp and signature, and the original is attached; where the registry or your solicitor asks for a translator’s affidavit, it is sworn before an Ankara notary and apostilled (£15). Apostilles on the Turkish death certificate or veraset ilamı can be arranged in Ankara for £15 each. You receive a PDF within 1–2 working days for certificates and 2–4 for wills, and a wet-signed set by courier from Ankara (£30) or UK Special Delivery (£8) for lodging with the registry. A death certificate is one page (£10); a veraset ilamı 2–4 pages (£20–40); a notarial will 3–8 pages (£30–80). No UK VAT is charged. For the mirror case, an English grant used for Turkish assets, see inheritance in Türkiye for heirs in the UK.