USCIS certified translation requirements, in plain English

One sentence, four requirements

The federal rule on translations for USCIS is a single sentence. It is quoted in full below. Read it once and you will know more than most people who file.

Here is what it asks for, piece by piece.

1. A full English translation. Every foreign-language document you send needs one. "Full" means the whole page, not the important parts.
2. A certification that the translation is complete and accurate. This is a signed statement by the translator.
3. A certification that the translator is competent. The same statement must say the translator can translate from that language into English.
4. The translation goes with the document. The translation is attached to a copy of the original, so an officer can compare them.

Notice what is missing. There is no notary. There is no license. There is no list of approved companies. There is no official form.

What "complete" really means

Complete means an officer can read the English version and see everything that is on the original. Translators handle the hard parts like this:

• Stamps and seals are written out in brackets: [Round seal: Civil Registry, State of Puebla].
• Signatures are marked as [signature] or [illegible signature], not guessed.
• Handwritten notes in the margins are translated and marked as handwritten.
• Blank fields are shown as blank, for example "Middle name: [blank]".
• The back of the page, if it has text, is translated too.

A translation that skips any of these is incomplete, even if every other word is perfect.

What "accurate" really means

Accurate means the English says what the original says. Nothing added, nothing removed, nothing improved.

Three things catch people:

• Names. The translation uses the spelling on the original, letter for letter. If your passport spells your name differently, the translator does not "fix" it; that difference is explained elsewhere in your case.
• Dates. Many countries write day first, then month. "03/04/1990" means 3 April in Mexico and March 4 in the United States. Good translations write the month as a word, "3 April 1990", so no one can misread it.
• Titles and offices. "Oficial del Registro Civil" is translated, not left in Spanish, and it is translated the same way every time it appears.

The certification statement

The rule does not give you wording. A statement that covers everything the rule asks for looks like this:

I, [full name], certify that I am competent to translate from [language] into English, and that the attached translation of [document name] is a complete and accurate translation of the original document. [Signature] [Date]

Some translators add their address, phone number or a credential number. That is helpful, not required. What is required is the name, the signature, the date, and the two promises: competence, and complete and accurate.

How to package it

Put the translation, the certification and a copy of the original together, in that order, for each document. If you are filing online, scan them as one file per document. If you are filing by mail, staple or clip them as a set. Do not send the original of a birth certificate unless USCIS asks for it.

Common ways a correct translation still gets questioned

• The certification is on a separate page with no way to tell which document it belongs to. Name the document in the statement.
• The copy of the original is dark or cut off. Officers compare the two; if they cannot read the original, they cannot confirm the translation.
• Two documents share one certification. Each document gets its own.
• The translation is in a different order than the original, so fields cannot be matched.

What the rule does not decide

The rule tells you what a translation needs. It does not tell you who to hire. That choice is yours. A translator whose status you can check online, and who names the document in their certification, gives an officer the least reason to ask questions.