When to obtain each document

Most document files are late not because any single step was slow, but because the steps were done in the order they occurred to someone. There is a better order, and it comes from one observation: documents differ enormously in how long they take to obtain and in how long they remain usable, and those two properties run in opposite directions.

Plan backwards, not forwards

Fix the submission date first. Then place the short-lived documents immediately before it, the apostille before the translation, the translation before the submission, and everything durable as early as you can. Working forwards from today produces a file whose earliest documents expire while its latest ones are still being requested.

Documents that never age — obtain these first

• Diplomas and transcripts. Slow to obtain, seasonal, and sometimes requiring sealed dispatch: see the sealed transcript page.
• Course descriptions and syllabi, where a professional order wants them. The largest and slowest item in any file that needs them.
• Employer letters, especially from former employers. A company that no longer exists cannot be hurried.
• Court judgments, which are retrieved from the court that issued them.
• The social security service record, which consolidates registered employment and does not go stale in substance.

What these have in common is that a delay of six months changes nothing about the document and everything about your schedule.

Documents with a short useful life — obtain these last

• The criminal record certificate. Quick to issue, quick to be considered out of date: see the criminal record page.
• Bank letters and account statements, which describe a single day. The financial documents page puts them at the end for that reason.
• Certificates of good standing or current registration from a professional body.
• Civil status extracts, which sit in between: the facts do not change, but bodies often want a recently issued copy so that later annotations are visible.

The rule that decides the whole sequence

The translation follows the document; the document does not wait for the translation. And the apostille, where required, is part of the document, so it precedes the translation as well. Applied to one item the order is: obtain the document, apostille it if required, then translate it, then submit. Applied to a whole file it means the translation is ordered once, at the end, against the list the authority actually asked for — not speculatively at the beginning. The apostille page and the file arrangement page cover the two ends of that sequence.

The apostille does not reset the clock

An apostilled criminal record certificate is exactly as old as the certificate underneath it. Applicants sometimes apostille a short-lived document early on the assumption that the certificate makes it durable; it makes it authenticated, which is a different property. When the underlying document is replaced, the new one needs its own apostille and its own translation.

What ages while you wait

Files sit still for reasons outside your control: a request for further documents, a stage that has not opened, a form returned because it was on a superseded version — see the form version page. Every one of those pauses ages the short-lived half of your set. Which is precisely why it should be the small half, obtained last, and why it is worth knowing in advance which documents you would have to replace. The page on documents expiring mid-application lists them.

How long the Turkish side takes

It depends on which documents, from which institutions and in which provinces, and whether an apostille and a notarial step are involved. We give a date range in the written quotation for your specific set rather than a general figure here, because a general figure would be wrong for most files. What is safe to say is that retrieval is usually longer than translation, and that documents from several provinces mean several separate journeys. The turnaround page explains which steps we control and which we do not.

What we do

Under a power of attorney we obtain the Turkish documents in the order above, arrange apostilles from the competent authority for each document type, and courier the wet-signed set with a complete colour scan of every side. Scheduling is part of the job: short-lived documents are timed against your submission date rather than fetched on the day the instruction is given. To get a sequence for your own file, the quotation page lists what we need to know.