Certified, sworn and notarised: the same words, different things

Three objects, one vocabulary

Somebody writes to you and asks for an official translation. Or a certified one, or a sworn one, or a notarised one, or — most unhelpfully of all — a legal translation. Those five phrases are used interchangeably by people who mean different things by them, and the difference can be a hundred dollars and a fortnight. Underneath the vocabulary there are three genuinely separate objects. They are not grades of one product: they come from different places, they are made by different people, and each says something the other two do not.

One: the American certificate

In the United States a certified translation is a translation with a signed certificate attached to it. There is no licence to hold, no register to be on and no examination anybody is required to have passed. The word describes the document.

What a certified translation is, here, is a complete rendering of everything on the document — text, stamps, seals, marginal notes, the illegible parts marked as illegible — with a signed statement attached naming the translator, saying they are competent in both languages, and saying the translation is complete and accurate. The certificate is included in the page rate on this site and never billed separately, because a certified translation without one is not one.

The federal regulation immigration filings run on asks for exactly that and asks nothing about the translator's qualifications, because there is no national qualification for it to ask about. Some translators have passed a professional body's examination and a great many excellent ones have not, and neither fact is what makes a translation certified.

This is where the word does its damage. A certified translation is a document; a certified translator is a person who has passed somebody's examination. The two are one letter apart in a sentence and a world apart in what they claim, and a company advertising the second is either naming a credential it should be willing to show you, or borrowing the authority of a word that belongs to the piece of paper.

Two: sworn status, which is not American at all

Sworn or official status is conferred on a named individual by a particular state, under that state's own procedure. Nobody in New York holds it by virtue of being here, and no American certificate is a substitute for it where a country requires one.

Most of continental Europe and much of Latin America does not use the American certificate at all. Instead the state appoints particular people — a traductor jurado in Spain, appointed by the foreign ministry; a traducteur assermenté in France, on a court of appeal's list; a perito traductor in Mexico, authorised by a state court — and only a translation stamped by one of them is official there. This office is not one of them and cannot become one from New York. What we do is find the appointed translator in the destination country, brief them, handle the correspondence and manage the job.

The whole value of that stamp is that it cannot be given to yourself. It is an appointment, held by a person, granted by a state, and it is the appointment rather than the translation that the receiving office checks. A company here describing its own certificate as sworn is not making a small terminological slip; it is describing an appointment it does not have.

Three: the notarial act, which is about a signature

A notary public verifies the identity of the person signing and witnesses the signature. No notary in this country attests that a translation is correct, and none is qualified to — the notary usually cannot read the source language.

A notarised translation is a certified translation whose certificate has been signed in front of a notary public. A notary public commissioned by the State of New York watches the translator sign the certificate, checks their identification, and completes a notarial certificate. What the notary attests is who signed. No notary in this country attests that a translation is correct.

The confusion is understandable, because a notarised translation feels more official and often costs more. What the extra step buys is a verified signature, which some consulates and every apostille require. It buys nothing about the words. If a notarial seal made a translation accurate, the accuracy of every document in the country would depend on somebody who never read it.

So what the extra step buys is a verified signature. Some consulates ask for one, some courts want it on an exhibit, and the authentication below is built on top of it. Most immigration filings take a certificate of accuracy with no notarial act at all, and being told so is worth more than being sold the extra step.

And a fourth object, which is not a translation at all

Preparing the notarised document for authentication, lodging it with the authority, tracking it and getting it back to you. The apostille itself is issued by a Secretary of State under the Hague Convention and by nobody else. The authority's own fee is passed on at what it costs.

Two things follow and both surprise people. An apostille says nothing whatever about whether the content of a document is true, and nothing about the translation: it authenticates a signature, the capacity of the person who signed, and the identity of a seal. And a translation company cannot issue one — it can get the document into the form the authority requires, lodge it, follow it and bring it back, which is what the handling fee on the rate card is for. Where the destination country is outside the Hague Convention the equivalent is consular legalisation, which is longer and runs through that country's consulate.

How to work out which one is being asked of you

Ask the office that wrote to you, in these terms rather than by repeating their own word back at them, because their word is the ambiguous part. Four questions settle almost every case.

• A signed statement from the translator, or a stamp from somebody your state has appointed? The first is the American certificate; the second means the job belongs to an appointed translator in that country.
• Does the translator's signature have to be witnessed by a notary public? A yes or a no, and cheap to ask. Usually no for a United States federal filing, usually yes where an apostille is going to follow.
• Does the document have to be authenticated for use abroad? The destination country decides whether that is an apostille or consular legalisation, and the sequence — translator, notary, authority — runs in that order.
• Paper, or is a PDF enough? The question that most often changes the price and the date, and almost nobody asks it.

If the answer is still just the word official, start with the certificate. It is what most offices take, it is the cheapest of the three, and the two answers you are missing are the whole difference between the cheapest version of this job and the most expensive one.