USCIS Certified Translation for Atlanta, GA

Applicants resettled from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo frequently hold no state-issued birth record at all. What they have instead: UNHCR registration documents, camp-issued certificates, resettlement agency records, or affidavits.

Each of these is translated as what it is, with the issuing body named as printed. That is not a weakness in a filing — USCIS has decades of experience adjudicating these cases and the framework for secondary evidence exists precisely for them.

What does damage a filing is a translation that presents a camp certificate or an affidavit as though it were a national civil registry extract. That is a misrepresentation, and it undermines documents that were acceptable on their own terms.

Documents that have survived displacement are often creased, faded, torn or photocopied many times. Where a section genuinely cannot be read, the translation marks it illegible and certifies the rest.

That is the required practice for a certifying translator. Guessing at a name or a date from context produces a certified document that states something the translator does not actually know.