Translation Bureau in Khobi

A translation bureau in Khobi - TARGMANEBI's service for a municipality where one group of documents bears directly on safety. At the Kulevi terminal oil, petroleum products and chemical cargoes arrive by rail and leave by tanker, and every consignment comes with dangerous goods documents: the class, the UN number, the safety data sheet, the emergency card. Those documents are in the language of international conventions - IMDG for the sea, ADR for the road, RID for the railway - and their translation has to use the standard wording rather than a free rendering. Beside the terminal, Khobi has ordinary Mingrelian life: hazelnuts, maize, families in Europe, students in Kutaisi.

The terminal's staff form a flow of their own: operators, engineers and safety specialists certified to international HSE standards, who take those certificates to terminals in Kazakhstan, the Gulf, Norway or offshore platforms. Tbilisi is four and a half hours from Khobi, Poti twenty minutes and Kutaisi an hour and a half; the courier comes to Khobi weekly, and terminal documents rarely need paper at all.

Dangerous goods - documents where nothing is translated "approximately"

Petroleum and chemical cargo documents serve three systems - the haulier, the terminal and the regulator - and each has a standardised form:

In translating a safety data sheet, the hazard statements, precautionary measures and pictogram descriptions are carried across in the standard Georgian wording that the international chemical safety system requires - because in an emergency the operator reads that phrase and acts on it. Class numbers, UN numbers and limit values are checked separately with the editor, and a terminology base is created for the terminal in which every product, tank and procedure is fixed once. Such a text goes to a translator with a chemical and technical profile.

HSE certificates - from the terminal to abroad

Kulevi's staff are certified to the standards of international oil companies, and those certificates open a career abroad: international industrial safety certificates, permits for working with dangerous goods, firefighting and first aid courses, offshore survival certificates, confined space entry permits. A foreign employer asks for them in English - often with an apostille and notarization - together with a service certificate stating the specific facility, the equipment and the responsibilities. In the other direction, certificates from foreign courses are translated into Georgian for the terminal's personnel file. Certificate names keep the term used by the international system, with the Georgian equivalent in a note - the employer is looking for exactly the original name.

The terminal's proximity concerns Khobi's villages too - environmental monitoring reports and public consultation material are often written in English, while a villager needs them in Georgian to know what is being measured next to their yard. We translate such text for information, in plain language, and where needed an interpreter attends the public consultation.

Khobi's farmers and families

Beyond the terminal, Khobi is a hazelnut and maize municipality from which as many people work in Europe as from the rest of Samegrelo. Farmers need a contract with a European buyer, a laboratory protocol and a grant report; families need certificates for an embassy, a school certificate for the university in Kutaisi, a power of attorney from Italy or Greece, a consent for a child to travel, a Soviet work record book for a pension. In a terminal worker's household those two flows often meet - an HSE certificate for Norway and a child's school certificate for Germany in one envelope - and are handled from one transliteration.

Languages in orders from Khobi

Because of the terminal, English is an everyday working language in Khobi - the language of dangerous goods, HSE and international audits - followed by Russian, the language of rail cisterns and of Kazakh and Azerbaijani oil documents. Turkish appears with tankers and cross-border trade, Ukrainian with traditional markets, Arabic with employment at Gulf terminals, and German and Dutch with European HSE systems. Papers of people from Khobi living in Europe come in Italian, Greek and Polish; French, Spanish, Czech and Chinese come from Khobi a few times a year, mostly with the terminal's suppliers.

The process for the terminal and its staff

Price and turnaround

An order from Khobi is at Tbilisi prices and the courier here runs weekly. A dangerous goods document costs more per page than an ordinary commercial one - because of the standard wording and the double checking - but rarely needs certification; an SDS takes one to two days, a declaration and an invoice hours, a regulation goes by volume; an HSE certificate with notarization and an apostille takes two to four days, a terminal worker's whole package a week, and a Khobi family's certificate two to three days. Standing work with the terminal and hauliers means a terminology base, templates and one invoice at the end of the month. Incident and audit reports go nowhere from us, and an error of ours in even one field of an SDS is corrected immediately and free of charge - with dangerous goods there is no other way, and responsibility for that is taken personally by the bureau's owner, the sole trader Mariam Zumadze (ID 30601010853).

The terminal's seasonality is worth allowing for: petroleum product flows rise in winter and audits often fall in spring. We advise regular clients to start updating regulations and safety data sheets a month before an audit - that way the inspector finds every document ready in Georgian and in English, and the comments concern the substance rather than the translation.

Frequently asked questions - translation in Khobi

Translation bureau in the other cities of Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti

Khobi is the back yard of the port of Poti and the Kulevi terminal; Zugdidi, Senaki, Abasha, Martvili, Tsalenjikha, Jvari, Chkhorotsku and Mestia are the region's other corners, each with its own accent. Choose your city.