Marriage Certificate Translation in Michigan

Lebanon has no civil marriage of its own. Marriages are performed by the religious authority of the couple's community - Sunni, Shia, Maronite, Orthodox, Druze and others - and then recorded with the state's personal status registry, whose civil extract is the proof.

Couples who wanted a civil marriage, often across religious lines, have long gone to Cyprus to marry, and Lebanon registers those marriages on their return. A Dearborn couple may therefore hold a Cypriot marriage certificate as their primary record, with a Lebanese registry extract alongside it. Where the Cypriot certificate is in English it needs no translation; the Arabic extract does.

Muslim marriages in Iraq are concluded as a contract recorded by a personal status court, and the court's certified contract is the record. It sets out the dowry - an advance portion and a deferred one - and those terms are translated as written, with the court named as printed.