Guides · 2026-09-09
You are filling in an application and you notice it: your passport says MUELLER and your birth certificate says Müller. Or your passport says Gladkikh and every recent Ukrainian document says Hladkykh. Or your Polish documents call you Kowalski in one place, Kowalska in another and Kowalskiego in a third.
None of this means anything is wrong with your papers. All of it can cause a question from the officer reading them, because they compare names character by character, across documents issued by different countries decades apart.
German. The passport itself carries two versions of your name: Müller in the name field and MUELLER in the machine-readable zone at the bottom. Both are official. ß becomes ss the same way. Neither is a mistake; they belong to different technical standards.
Ukrainian and Russian. Ukraine changed its official romanisation in 2010. The same surname is Gladkikh under the old system and Hladkykh under the current one. Documents issued before and after that date legitimately differ, and Soviet-era originals are often in Russian rather than Ukrainian.
Bulgarian. There is a statutory transliteration law, but passports issued at different times, and by different offices, do not always match it — Гергана appears as both Gergana and Guergana.
Polish and other Slavic languages. Surnames decline by grammatical case and gender. One family appears as Kowalski, Kowalska and Kowalskiego in three documents, all correct.
Spanish and Portuguese. Two surnames, paternal and maternal. Anglophone systems routinely drop the second one, and then nothing matches.
Arabic, Urdu and other non-Latin scripts. There is no single correct romanisation. Mohammed, Muhammad and Mohamed are the same name written by different clerks.
Japanese and Chinese. Kanji and hanzi have multiple valid readings; your passport already fixed one of them, years ago, and the certificate does not know that.
A certified translation reproduces what the original document says. If your certificate reads Müller, the translation reads Müller. A translator who silently changes it to Mueller has produced a document that no longer matches the original — which is exactly what an officer is checking for when they hold the two side by side.
What a translation can do is remove the ambiguity: render the name as printed, and add a short translator's note where the passport form differs. The officer then sees a documented explanation instead of an unexplained discrepancy.
Decide which spelling your application uses — normally the passport, because that is the identity document everything else is checked against — and use it consistently in every field you control: forms, cover letters, the address on the envelope.
Then tell whoever translates your documents what that spelling is, before delivery. It takes one sentence and it is the difference between a clean filing and a query.
Send us the spelling on your passport or BRP — at upload, or by replying to your order email — and we apply it before delivery at no extra charge, with the original spelling preserved and annotated where the two differ. If you only notice after you have downloaded the PDF, reply and we re-issue, also free.
This is the single most common avoidable problem we see on documents from Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Pakistan, and it is fixed by one line of information that only you have.