USCIS Certified Translation for New York City

In our experience the recurring causes are procedural rather than linguistic.

Partial translation. The front of a birth certificate is translated and the reverse - carrying the registrar's annotations, corrections or a security seal - is not. USCIS treats that as an incomplete document.

Missing seals and stamps. A seal is content. A translation should describe it, not skip it because it is not a sentence.

Name inconsistency. Where a name transliterates differently across documents, an adjudicator has to decide whether these records describe one person. Supplying the passport spelling avoids that entirely.

Notarization instead of certification. A notary attests to identity, not accuracy. Some applicants pay for notarization and receive no certificate of accuracy, which is the thing that was actually required.

I-130 - petitioner and beneficiary birth certificates, marriage certificate, and divorce decrees or death certificates ending any prior marriage.

I-485 - birth certificate, police certificates where required, and the civil documents supporting the underlying petition.

N-400 - usually fewer documents, but name-change records, foreign divorce decrees and tax or travel documentation may all need translating.

I-751 - joint-life evidence, which frequently includes foreign leases, bank records and correspondence. These are often long, and translating them completely is the whole point.