Turkish court interpreter: a three language site with a guide before the enquiry

This is a case study of the website of a court interpreter for Turkish in Montenegro. If you need a certified translation from or into Turkish, the official site is tumaczaturski.com.

Client and context

The client is a court interpreter for Turkish, appointed by the Ministry of Justice of Montenegro and based in Podgorica. The work covers certified written translation of documents, consecutive and simultaneous interpreting at trials, meetings and notaries, and urgent translation. I built the site in 2025, in one week. It is a presentation site with no admin panel, and I have maintained it since.

Problem

A certified translation is usually needed under deadline pressure and with unclear instructions from the institution asking for it. Someone looking for a court interpreter for the first time does not know what a certified translation is, which documents to bring, in what form, or how long it will take. If the site does not tell them, they call and ask first, and only then send the document.

The second part of the problem is language. For a court interpreter, language is not a sales channel; it is the service itself. Some clients are native Turkish speakers, so a site only in Bosnian would make little sense.

Constraints

Nothing was technically complicated: it is a presentation site with a few pages. The constraint was the Turkish copy. On a court interpreter's website the translation has to be legally and grammatically exact, so I did not translate the Turkish parts myself. I put together the structure and all the copy, and the interpreter translated parts into Turkish and sent them to me. That is why the Turkish version took longer than the rest of the site: I waited for an exact translation, not a fast one.

Solution

Three languages, each with its own URLs

The site runs in Bosnian, English and Turkish. Bosnian is the default, and the English and Turkish versions have their own URLs (/en/ and /tr/). The language is chosen in the header, with a flag and the language name. The Turkish version is not a word for word translation: its headline reads "Karadağ'da Türkçe Yeminli Tercüman" (sworn Turkish translator in Montenegro), the usual Turkish term for a court interpreter, rather than a literal rendering of the Bosnian headline.

Services split the way people ask for them

Certified written translation and interpreting are separate, because people ask for them separately. On the services page, visitors choose between written, oral and urgent translation and read only what concerns them. For urgent work the site states plainly that it is done to an agreed deadline with a surcharge for urgency.

Documents listed by type

Visitors often do not know whether their document can be translated at all, so documents are grouped: court documents (judgments, decisions, lawsuits, powers of attorney), education documents (diplomas, school certificates, transcripts), personal documents (civil registry extracts, certificates, passports) and medical documents (specialist reports, discharge summaries).

A PDF guide before the form

A separate part of the site is the guide to preparing documents, which I made as a downloadable PDF. It sits before the form, so visitors first learn what they need and only then send a request. The guide has five parts:

1. which documents can be translated, in the same groups as on the site, plus business documents (contracts, invoices, company register extracts);
2. how to prepare a document: legible and complete, with no missing text or stamps, and scanned in high resolution as PDF or JPEG instead of a blurry phone photo;
3. how to deliver it: in person, via WhatsApp, by email or by courier;
4. turnaround: 1 to 3 working days as standard, urgent within 24 hours by arrangement and with a surcharge;
5. whether a certified translation is legally valid, and contact details for delivery.

Contact on every page

Phone, WhatsApp and email sit in the top bar of every page, along with opening hours (Monday to Friday, 8:00 to 16:00). The button to request a translation is in the header and in the first screen of the home page. The form on the contact page asks for name, email, phone and type of service (written, oral, urgent or other), and for urgent requests the site points visitors straight to the phone or WhatsApp, to agree on the deadline.

What a client learns before the first enquiry

Client's question	Where the answer is
What is a certified translation?	the "What is a certified translation?" section on the home and services pages
Do you translate my document?	the list of documents by type and the PDF guide
How do I send the document?	PDF guide: in person, WhatsApp, email or courier
How long will it take?	PDF guide: 1 to 3 working days, urgent within 24 hours
Can I do this in Turkish?	the Turkish version of the site, at /tr/

The site answers these questions before the client gets in touch, so the form and WhatsApp are used for the document itself and for agreeing on the deadline.

Technologies and why

The site is built in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and HTML. A presentation site with a few pages in three languages needed nothing more: what mattered was that each language version has its own URLs and titles for Google, that contact details are visible at once, and that the guide can be downloaded without sending an enquiry.

Result

The site brings in more than 10 enquiries a month, by email and WhatsApp, and the number is slowly growing. The guide and the document list are there so that an enquiry starts with the document, not with "what do I need" (as of October 2026).