An allonge is a separate sheet attached to a document to carry the apostille certificate when the certificate is not placed on the document itself. The term comes from article 4 of the Apostille Convention, which allows both placements; the English text keeps the French word in quotation marks. For a receiving office the practical question is how the sheet is tied to the document it certifies, and a Turkish circular answers it for one group of apostille authorities.
One word in three texts of article 4
The English text says the certificate “shall be placed on the document itself or on an ‘allonge’”; the French text says “sur l’acte lui-même ou sur une allonge”. The Turkish text in the Official Gazette of 16 September 1984 uses no loanword: it speaks of a sheet to be attached to the document, buna eklenecek bir kağıt. All three give the two placements equal standing, and none prefers the document itself. The same article requires the certificate to follow the model in the annex, and the annex published in the Gazette describes it as a square with sides of at least nine centimetres.
Joining the sheet: circular 68/1
The Convention does not say how the sheet is fastened. The Turkish Ministry of Justice circular 68/1 fills that gap in its paragraph 7: the certificate is prepared on the model in annex 2 of the circular, as a square with sides of at least nine centimetres, and placed on the document or on a sheet attached to it; where the certificate is on a separate document, it is joined to the certified document and the seal of the certifying authority is pressed on the place where the two meet. The seal across the join is what ties the sheet to one particular document. The model in annex 2 prints its field names in Turkish, English, French and German.
What the allonge does not change
An allonge changes the position of the certificate, not its content. Under article 5 the certificate still attests the signature, the capacity of the signatory and the seal on the underlying document, and its ten fields are the same whichever placement is used. Nor is the sheet a public document of its own; it is the certificate of the document it is joined to.
What was not found
Circular 68/1 is addressed to the judicial commissions, which apostille judicial documents. The Interior Ministry circular 2009/31 lists the ten fields of the certificate but says nothing about its placement. Three district governor’s offices, Zile, Armutlu and İspir, describe their own steps on pages built from one template: the apostille is stuck on the back of the document and filled in, the document is registered and given a number, and it is then presented for signature. That places the certificate on the document itself. Whether a provincial or district governor’s office ever uses a separate sheet, and whether it would seal the join as circular 68/1 prescribes, was not found in a published source in this site’s survey. For an e-Apostil, the electronic certificate of the official Turkish system, no sample document could be examined, so how the certificate and the document are combined in the file is not described here.
An allonge in a translated file
When the apostille sits on an allonge, the translator sees two sheets and a seal running across their edge. Whether the certificate on the attached sheet is translated with the document is decided by the institution receiving it, and that question is asked before the translation starts. If it is translated, the translation can state that the certificate appears on an attached sheet joined by the authority’s seal, so that the reader knows where on the original the certificate was placed.