Names, dates and numbers are the hard part

The prose is rarely the problem

People expect the difficulty in a certificate to be the language. It almost never is: the body of a civil record is a handful of set phrases that have been written the same way for a century, and any competent translator renders them without pausing.

What stops a translator is the name. And the date, the identity number, the figure in the third column, and the two characters at the end of a surname that mean something in the original and nothing in English. Each of those is a decision that has to be taken and defended, none has an answer that can be looked up, and all of them land on a document where a name has to match a passport in front of an officer who did not choose you. That is what a signature on a certificate is for.

How many names, and in what order

Spanish. Two surnames, the father's before the mother's, and only the first of them survives most American forms. A woman's records may carry de and her husband's name in one country and not in the next, and the same person's identity number is a DNI, a CURP, a cédula or a RUT depending on where the paper was issued. The name is transcribed exactly as the document has it, with the passport spelling noted beside it rather than chosen between.

Portuguese. The order is the reverse — the mother's family name first and the father's last — so a reader who has learned the Spanish rule and applies it to a Brazilian certificate gets the answer exactly backwards, and the mistake is invisible unless you happen to know both.

Hungarian. The family name comes first. Nagy István is Mr Nagy, and a form filled in by somebody reading left to right has created a person who does not exist on the certificate. Hungarian records also give the mother's maiden name as a standard identifying field, which American forms have no box for and officers ask about.

Names that change shape

Polish. Surnames decline for gender: one family is Kowalski and Kowalska, so a father and a daughter on the same certificate do not appear to share a name. Polish declines a name inside a sentence as well, which means a single document can show four spellings of one surname and all four of them are correct.

Czech and Slovak. A woman's surname takes -ová, so a passport says Nováková and an American marriage certificate says Novak, and both are the same person.

Lithuanian. A woman's surname ending has historically told the reader whether she is married — -aitė unmarried, -ienė married — and the neutral -ė form is now available and not universally used. Flatten it to a plain surname and you have thrown away information that is on the document; explain it and you have told a stranger something about her marital status. It is rendered and footnoted.

The rule underneath all three is the same one this office applies everywhere. Where the form of a name carries a fact, the translation renders what the document says and adds a note about the grammar, rather than flattening the name into an American convention or asserting the fact the grammar only implies.

Names that have to cross an alphabet

Greek. Transliteration is the whole job. The standard system, the passport spelling and the spelling a family has used here for forty years are frequently three different Latin renderings of one name, and choosing one of them silently is how a filing acquires a discrepancy. The standard rendering goes on the translation and the others are recorded.

Bulgarian. The same problem with a date attached: the country legislated its own transliteration system in 2009, so a passport issued after that spells a name one way, a document issued before it another, and a family here a third. The middle name on a Bulgarian record is a patronymic rather than a second given name, and translating it as a middle name quietly asserts something about the family that the document does not say.

German. A passport transliterates Müller as MUELLER while the birth certificate spells it Müller, so one person appears under two spellings in the same bundle and an officer comparing them sees a discrepancy. Both are given, with a note of which document each came from, which is the only version of that answer that is true.

Latvian. Latvian law adapts a foreign name to Latvian grammar, so John Smith is written Džons Smits on a Latvian document about him, and that is the official spelling rather than an error. The original is usually in an annotation on the certificate, and finding it is part of the work rather than a bonus.

Numbers that are not arbitrary

Almost every country on this panel keys its records to a national identity number, and several of those numbers encode facts. A Romanian CNP carries sex, date of birth and county. A Czech rodné číslo carries the date of birth and the sex. An Estonian isikukood carries the century, which is how a form with two digits for the year tells 1898 from 1998. An Italian codice fiscale is generated from the name, the date and the place of birth, so one misread letter in a surname produces a code that does not match the person.

The useful consequence is that these can be checked against the rest of the document. Occasionally they disagree, and the disagreement is raised rather than smoothed over.

The decimal comma, which is a factor of a thousand

Bank statements. The decimal comma. Most of Europe writes one thousand two hundred and thirty-four euros and fifty cents as 1.234,50 and an American reader sees a number a thousand times smaller. Every figure is converted to the American convention and the conversion is stated on the translation, because a silent change to a number in a financial document is the one thing nobody should ever have to take on trust.

Dates behave the same way and catch fewer people only because the error is usually visible. The European order puts the day first, so the eleventh of March and the third of November are the same two numerals in opposite positions, and where both numbers are twelve or below there is nothing on the face of the document to say which was meant. Date formats are converted with the conversion stated, for exactly the same reason the figures are.

Why any of this needs a person

Every decision above is defensible and none of it is derivable. There is no rule that produces the right answer for a woman whose passport says Nováková and whose American marriage certificate says Novak. There is a judgement about which spelling goes on the translation, a note recording the other one, and somebody who signed the certificate and can be asked why they chose as they did.

That is the whole of the argument for buying this from a named person when the document has to be accepted by somebody. The prose is easy. The names are not, and the names are the part the officer is checking.