Death Certificate Translation

<p>A death certificate is usually needed at a difficult time and by several institutions at once - a probate court, an insurer, a pension or benefits office, sometimes USCIS. Each reads it for a different fact, and a translation has to carry all of them.</p>

Who needs it, and what each of them is looking for

• Probate and estates. A US court administering the estate of someone who died abroad, or foreign heirs proving a death in a US proceeding, needs the date and place of death and the identity of the deceased beyond doubt.
• Life insurance and benefits. Insurers and benefits offices read the cause and manner of death as closely as the date.
• USCIS. When a previous spouse has died, the death certificate is the evidence that the earlier marriage ended - without it, a new marriage-based petition cannot show it is valid.
• Repatriation. Consulates of the destination country require the death certificate, usually translated and authenticated, before remains can travel.

Cause of death is not always on the civil record

In some countries the civil death record and the medical certificate are separate documents. In France, for example, the town hall draws up the acte de décès while the medical certificate completed by the doctor is a different, confidential form. If an insurer wants the cause of death, the civil record alone may not contain it, and it is worth knowing that before you order a translation of the wrong document.

Where a cause of death does appear, it is translated with the medical terminology exactly as written. We do not simplify a diagnosis or replace it with a nearest equivalent.

Names across a set of documents

An estate or a USCIS petition often involves the death certificate alongside birth and marriage records for the same person. The spelling of the name has to hold across all of them. Send them together and tell us the spelling used on official documents; we keep it consistent and show genuine variants rather than hiding them.

US death certificates going abroad

A US death certificate is issued by the state vital records office or a local registrar, and apostilled by the state's apostille authority. The state pages below name both. The apostilled certificate is then translated into the destination language.