Slovak translator in Tbilisi

Slovak translation in Georgia has grown in recent years because of one particular sector: Slovakia produces more cars per head of population than any country in the world, the plants of Bratislava, Zilina, Trnava and Nitra look for labour outside the European Union, and Georgian operators, welders, logisticians and engineers have become part of that flow. They are followed by students at Comenius University in Bratislava and at the medical faculty in Kosice, by Georgian-Slovak families, by drivers working in Slovakia and by employees of Slovak construction companies, while in the opposite direction come Slovak development programmes and tourists in Georgia. We translate from Slovak into Georgian and from Georgian into Slovak, certify the translation before a notary and attach the apostille at the House of Justice. On this page we explain what makes Slovakia different: the institution of the court translator, which the authorities demand strictly, the apostille, which is split between five different bodies, the marking system in which a 1 is the best mark, and the surname ending -ová, which the Slovak register writes for a Georgian woman as well.

The court translator (súdny prekladateľ) and what that means for a Georgian document

In Slovakia an official translation is performed by a court translator entered in the register of the Ministry of Justice, who has passed an examination and executes the translation with a stamp of their own, bound with a tricolour ribbon and recorded under a number. Slovak authorities, the foreign police, the civil registry offices (matričný úrad), the courts and the Ministry of Education require the translation of a foreign document from precisely that registered translator, and unlike other countries they often do not accept a translation certified before a notary in Georgia, even with an apostille. A court translator for the Georgian language practically does not exist in Slovakia, and Slovak bureaus translate a Georgian document through Russian or English, which costs both time and quality. So towards Slovakia we have two routes, and we establish before the order which one suits a particular case: an English translation of the Georgian document made in Georgia, with notarial certification and an apostille, which a court translator of English in Slovakia, of whom there are many, converts into Slovak quickly; or our Slovak translation, which universities, employers and banks, unlike the authorities, ordinarily accept. In the opposite direction, when a Slovak document is translated into Georgian, the Georgian system applies: a Georgian notary certifies our translator's signature, and a Georgian authority accepts that.

The apostille in Slovakia: five bodies for one stamp

Slovakia has applied the Hague Apostille Convention since 2002, and the issuing of the apostille is split between five bodies according to the type of document, which is one of the most fragmented systems in Europe. On civil status documents, birth, marriage and death certificates, the apostille is attached by the Ministry of the Interior; on diplomas and school certificates by the Ministry of Education; on medical documents by the Ministry of Health; on court and notarial documents, including the translations of court translators, by the relevant regional court (krajský súd), in eight regions; and on everything else, including the criminal record certificate and tax certificates, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If you take a diploma to the Ministry of the Interior, you will be turned away; if you take a birth certificate to a court, the same will happen. We tell the client in advance where each document is apostilled, and in Bratislava that means saving a week and several visits. In the opposite direction everything is simple: a Georgian document for Slovakia receives the apostille at the House of Justice, which we handle within the order. The apostille is attached to the original, not to the translation.

Who comes to us for Slovak translation

• Employees of the car plants and their suppliers in Bratislava, Zilina, Trnava and Nitra: a diploma, a vocational certificate, a certificate of experience and a criminal record certificate for the work permit
• Drivers, builders and workers of logistics companies who need documents for the foreign police
• Students at Comenius University, the Slovak University of Technology, Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, where medicine taught in English is popular among Georgians, and the University of Zilina
• Doctors and nurses from whom the Slovak medical chambers request documents for registration
• Georgian-Slovak families: marriage, registration of a child in both countries, divorce, inheritance
• Georgians living in Slovakia who need a Slovak certificate, court decision or register extract in Georgia
• Georgian and Slovak companies: car parts, logistics, tourism, wine, IT, Slovak development programmes in Georgia

The foreign police: the hardest door to residence in Slovakia

In Slovakia the residence permit is issued by the foreign police (oddelenie cudzineckej polície), whose offices, especially in Bratislava, are among the most overloaded in Europe: queues from early morning, online appointment slots that fill within seconds, and cases that by law must be decided within 90 days and often take longer. A work residence begins with a vacancy registered by the employer at the labour office (úrad práce), which must first be offered to European Union citizens, except for the shortage occupations, a list filled with the professions of the car industry and logistics; for Georgian workers that list is the shortest route. The package of Georgian documents includes a diploma or vocational certificate, a certificate of work experience, a criminal record certificate, proof of accommodation and, in the case of a family, marriage and birth certificates, with an apostille and a Slovak translation by a court translator, and the foreign police allows no exception to that requirement. One detail that often delays a case: the criminal record certificate must not be older than 90 days, and if the translation and the apostille do not fit within that period, the certificate has to be obtained again. So we plan the package so that obtaining the certificate, the apostille and the translation fit into one week and everything is valid on the day appointed by the foreign police.

A marking system where a one is the best

The Slovak school uses a five-point system in which 1 (výborný) is the best and 5 (nedostatočný) is a fail, while the university uses ECTS letters (A-E, Fx) or inverted figures, where 1 is again the best. This is exactly the reverse of the Georgian system, where 10 at school and 100 at university are the top marks, and an explanation of the scale is obligatory in the translation of a Slovak diploma or school certificate, otherwise a Georgian recipient will read three ones as three fails; from our experience this is the most frequent error we meet in other people's Slovak translations. The recognition of a Georgian diploma in Slovakia is handled by the Ministry of Education's centre for the recognition of educational documents (Stredisko na uznávanie dokladov o vzdelaní), which is also Slovakia's ENIC/NARIC centre, while for continuing studies it is the university itself; both accept documents in Slovak, translated by a court translator, or in some cases in Czech and English, ask for the supplement or the transcript together with the diploma and expect an apostilled original. The English-language medical programmes in Kosice and Bratislava are popular with Georgian students, and for admission the school certificate, the transcript and a language certificate are translated into English, while after the return a Slovak medical diploma is submitted to Georgia's National Center for Educational Quality Enhancement with the apostille of the Ministry of Education and our Georgian translation. The Slovak school leaving certificate (maturitné vysvedčenie) records the results of the maturita separately, and that is explained separately in the translation.

The Slovak language in translation: -ová, cases and the closeness to Czech

Slovak is a West Slavic language with six cases, and every name, including a foreign one, is declined: the Georgian Giorgi Beridze becomes Giorgiho Beridzeho, Giorgimu Beridzemu in a Slovak text, and in the translation we return the name to the form in the passport. The most important thing for translation is the -ová ending of a Slovak woman's surname: the Slovak civil registry office writes a woman's surname automatically with that ending, including a foreign woman's, and a Georgian woman's Slovak marriage certificate or her child's birth certificate may say Beridzeová unless something else was requested at registration; the law allows a foreign woman to be entered without the ending, but this must be requested at the moment of registration, and we warn our Georgian clients about it in advance. A Georgian authority that sees Beridze and Beridzeová reads two different people, so in a note to the translation we explain the rule of the ending, while the surname itself is written in the form of the passport. Slovak is so close to Czech that mutual understanding is almost complete, and there are many "Czech-Slovak" translators on the market; in an official document this is a risk, because the names of the authorities, the legal terminology and the orthography differ (the Slovak ľ, ť, ň, ď, ô, ä, ŕ, ĺ do not exist in Czech, and the Czech ř and ů do not exist in Slovak), and a Slovak authority notices a translation written with Czech vocabulary at once. Our Slovak translators work to the Slovak norm, with the experience of study or life in Slovakia.

rodné číslo, trvalý pobyt and Slovak administration

In Slovakia every citizen and permanent resident has a birth number (rodné číslo), ten digits in which the date of birth and the sex are encoded and which is the basis of health insurance, social insurance, tax and banking relations; a foreigner receives it from the foreign police together with the residence card. The Georgian personal number has eleven digits, and both stay unchanged in the translation, with a note saying which belongs to which system. Slovak administration is built on the registration of the place of residence: permanent (trvalý pobyt) and temporary (prechodný pobyt) residence are separate categories, and a certificate of residence (potvrdenie o pobyte) appears regularly among a Georgian client's documents. Slovak certificates have in recent years been issued online, through the slovensko.sk portal, with an electronic signature, while a Georgian authority asks for a printed version with an apostille; we tell the client in advance which document must be requested on paper and at which ministry it is apostilled.

Marriage and family: matričný úrad and the child's surname

In Slovakia a marriage is registered by the civil registry office (matričný úrad) or, in the case of a religious marriage with civil effect, by the church, and the foreign partner must submit a birth certificate, a certificate of family status, a certificate of legal capacity to marry (osvedčenie o právnej spôsobilosti na uzavretie manželstva) and proof of residence, with an apostille and a translation by a court translator, ordinarily not older than six months. A Georgian authority does not issue a "certificate of capacity to marry" as a separate document, and the certificate of family status performs that function, which we explain for the Slovak office in a note to the translation; this is one of the frequent reasons why the papers of a Georgian couple come back from Slovakia the first time. The birth of a child in Slovakia means a double registration for a Georgian parent: the Slovak birth certificate (rodný list) goes with the apostille of the Ministry of the Interior and our Georgian translation to the consulate or the House of Justice, while in the translation we explain in a note the form of the child's and the mother's surname, with or without the -ová ending, so that the child's Georgian passport matches the form the parents chose. The Slovak certificate is also issued in the European multilingual form, but Georgian is not among the languages of that form, so a translation is still needed.

Slovak documents we translate most often

• Birth, marriage and death certificates (rodný list, sobášny list, úmrtný list)
• A certificate of residence and the data of the residence card
• The criminal record certificate (výpis z registra trestov) from the general prosecutor's office, valid for 90 days
• Diploma, supplement, school certificate, maturita certificate, description of the study programme, recognition decision
• Certificates of the social insurance agency (Sociálna poisťovňa) on length of service, contributions, sickness and maternity leave
• Tax certificates from the financial administration, the annual income certificate (potvrdenie o príjme)
• Documents of the health insurance companies, medical prescriptions, discharge summaries
• Court decisions on maintenance, guardianship, divorce and inheritance cases, a notary's inheritance resolution
• The extract of the commercial register (obchodný register), the founding agreement (spoločenská zmluva), the decision appointing a director
• Employment contracts of the car industry, shift schedule annexes, certificates of qualification

Business with Slovakia: s.r.o., the commercial register and the car industry

The Slovak limited liability company (s.r.o., spoločnosť s ručením obmedzeným) is the counterpart of the Georgian Sh.P.S., and the a.s. of the joint stock company; both are registered in the commercial register kept at the district courts, not in a business register, and the extract (výpis z obchodného registra) is issued online with legal force. A Slovak company has three numbers, IČO (identification), DIČ (tax) and IČ DPH (VAT, with the SK prefix), and all three stay unchanged in the translation, with a note saying which is which. The main direction of Georgian-Slovak business is the car industry: the suppliers of Slovak plants hire Georgian specialists, Georgian logistics companies work with Slovak partners on the carriage of car parts and finished cars, and employment contracts, shift schedule annexes, safety instructions and quality standard documents are translated from Slovak into Georgian, so that the worker understands before signing what they are signing. Slovak development cooperation (SlovakAid) funds projects in local self-government, energy efficiency and the social sphere in Georgia, and the contracts, reports and audit opinions of those projects are translated from Slovak and from English. In tourism the flow of Slovak tourists to Georgia is growing, and Georgian wine enters the Slovak market through the Czech Republic and Poland.

Transliteration: Slovak names in Georgian

Slovak names are carried into Georgian by pronunciation: Juraj sounds as Iuraia, Ľubomír as Lubomiri, Peter as Peteri, Zuzana as Zuzana, Nováková as Novakova, Bratislava as Bratislava, Košice as Koshice, Žilina as Zhilina, Trnava as Trnava, Nitra as Nitra, Banská Bystrica as Banska Bistrica. The letter č sounds as ch, š as sh, ž as zh, while ľ, ť, ň, ď are soft consonants, ô resembles uo, ä stands between e and a, ch is a hard h, and the stress always falls on the first syllable. Once chosen, a form stays unchanged in every document of that person or place. A name standing in a case form (Petra, Petrovi, Beridzeho) is returned to the nominative and compared with the passport, while a woman's -ová ending stays in the form of the original and is explained in a note. In the opposite direction a Georgian name goes into Slovak in the Latin spelling of the passport, and we do not change that spelling; a Slovak authority compares the name with the passport, not with the pronunciation, and only adds a case ending or, for a woman, the -ová, which our translation explains by giving both forms.

Typical mistakes in Slovak translation

When we check other people's translations, the same mistakes recur: reading a Slovak one as a Georgian fail and leaving the inverted scale without explanation; submitting a translation certified in Georgia to the foreign police, which does not accept it without a court translator; looking for the apostille on a diploma at the Ministry of the Interior and on a birth certificate at a court; translating Beridzeová and Beridze as two people without a note, or conversely "correcting" the -ová against the original; a name left in a case form that no longer matches the passport; a "Slovak" translation written with Czech vocabulary and orthography; translating a criminal record certificate older than 90 days; looking for a "certificate of capacity to marry" in the Georgian system, where it does not exist, instead of writing a note; printing and translating an electronic certificate without an apostille; translating s.r.o. as "joint stock company"; and translating a Georgian document into Slovak through Russian. Every one of these points is on our checklist, and the editor checks every Slovak translation against that list.

What sets our Slovak translation apart

• We know which Slovak authority requires a court translator and which is satisfied with English or with our certification, and we tell you before the order
• Knowledge of the five apostille bodies in Slovakia and one order in Georgia: notarial certification by a translator registered in the Slovak-Georgian pair and the apostille at the House of Justice
• Correct handling of the inverted scale, the -ová ending, the cases and Slovak orthography, checked against the passport, without any mixing with Czech
• The foreign police package within the deadlines: the 90 days of the criminal record certificate, the apostille and the translation within one week
• Terminology of car industry, logistics and corporate documents, with explanations of Sociálna poisťovňa and commercial register certificates
• A standard personal document in 1 working day, express in 1-2 hours, the process fully remote, from Bratislava and from Kosice as well

Frequently asked questions