Birth Certificate Translation

<p>A birth certificate is the document we translate most often, and it is the one most often sent back. Almost always for the same two reasons — and both are avoidable if you know about them before you order.</p>

The two things that get birth certificate translations rejected

1. The translation is not complete

"Complete" does not mean the biographical data. It means the entire document: the registry number, the issuing office and its seal, the registrar's signature block, any marginal annotations, and the reverse side if anything is printed there.

Partial translations that cover only the front-face name, date and parents are the single most common defect we see in work done elsewhere. A reviewer cannot confirm the document is a genuine civil record if the parts that establish its provenance were never translated.

Marginal annotations deserve particular attention. Many countries record later events — a legitimation, a name correction, an adoption, a court-ordered amendment — as a note in the margin of the original entry rather than by issuing a new document. If your petition depends on one of those facts, it is in the margin, and omitting it omits the point.

2. The name does not match your other documents

If your birth certificate transliterates a name one way and your passport another, and the translation reproduces both without explanation, a reviewer sees a discrepancy between two documents that are supposed to describe the same person.

This is routine for names originating in non-Latin scripts, and for languages with characters English lacks. Send us the spelling exactly as it appears on your passport. We keep it consistent across every document in your set and handle genuine variants so the relationship between spellings is visible rather than looking like an error.

What "certified" means here

A certified translation is the full translation plus a signed certificate of accuracy, in which the translator attests the translation is complete and accurate and that they are competent to make it. That certificate is what makes it acceptable to USCIS, courts, universities and licensing boards. Ours is signed by a State Court Certified Translator and included at no extra charge.

USCIS does not require notarization. A certificate of accuracy is sufficient under the federal regulations. Notarization is frequently sold alongside immigration translation and, for a USCIS filing specifically, it is usually money you do not need to spend. Some county clerks, courts and consulates do require it — see notarized translation for when it genuinely applies.

If your document is not in Latin script

Certificates in Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Thai and similar scripts carry an additional transliteration decision on every proper noun — names, places, issuing authorities. Several of our language pages cover the specific conventions involved, including Arabic, Russian and Turkish.