Apostille Services

An apostille is a certificate issued by a designated state authority confirming that a public document is genuine — that the signature, seal or stamp on it belongs to a real official acting in that capacity. It exists because of the 1961 Hague Convention, and it allows a document issued in one member country to be accepted in another without further consular legalization.

Two things about apostilles surprise most people, and both affect what you should order:

• An apostille authenticates the document, not the translation. It says the birth certificate is a real birth certificate. It says nothing about whether your translation of it is accurate — that is what the certificate of accuracy is for. Many customers need both.
• Apostilles only work between Hague Convention countries. If the destination country is not a member, the document goes through consular legalization instead, which is a different and usually longer process.

What gets apostilled

Apostilles are issued for public documents — vital records, court documents, notarized documents, and certain corporate and academic records. Private documents generally must be notarized first, which converts the notary's act into the public document that the state can then authenticate. This is why notarization and apostille are so often ordered together; see notarized translation.

Order of operations matters and is easy to get wrong. Authenticating a document and then translating it, when the destination wanted the translation authenticated too, means starting over. Tell us the destination country and what the receiving body asked for, and we will sequence it correctly the first time.