Guides · 2026-09-09
If your document comes from Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Brazil or a dozen other countries, you have grown up with a system where translations are done by a translator sworn in before a court. In Germany that is a vereidigter Übersetzer; in Italy the procedure is asseverazione at the tribunale; Poland has the tłumacz przysięgły; Spain the traductor jurado appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
These are real legal institutions, and inside those countries they are usually mandatory. Outside them, they are frequently irrelevant — and that mismatch costs people money every day.
There is no sworn-translator register in either country. There is no licence, no government appointment, and no membership requirement.
USCIS states the rule in 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3): any document in a foreign language must be accompanied by a full English translation, plus a certification by the translator that they are competent to translate and that the translation is accurate. Two things. That is the entire requirement.
UKVI and the Home Office ask for a full translation carrying a statement that it is a true and accurate translation of the original, the date of translation, and the translator's credentials and contact details.
Neither asks who appointed the translator, because neither country appoints translators.
The expensive mistake is not "I used a certified translation where a sworn one was needed". It is the reverse: paying a court-sworn translator in your home country, at home-country prices, purely to satisfy a US or UK application that never asked for it. An asseverazione involves a court appointment, a sworn statement and revenue stamps. A German beglaubigte Übersetzung is priced per line. For a filing that only required a certified English translation with a signed statement of accuracy, that is the wrong country's procedure applied to the wrong country's rules.
It happens because the phrase "official translation" means something specific and legally binding at home, and something much looser abroad — and nobody warns you at the point where you are deciding.
Notarisation is a separate thing again: a notary confirms the identity of the person signing the certification. It says nothing about translation quality. It is genuinely requested by:
If your instructions say notarised, get it notarised. If they say certified, notarisation adds cost and delay and nothing else.
Before you pay anyone — us included — ask the office that will read the document:
"Does the translation have to be produced by a translator registered with a professional body, or is a certified translation with a signed statement of accuracy sufficient?"
The answer decides everything. Most immigration and civil filings in the US and UK accept the second. A minority of bodies — some UK professional registers, for instance — do ask for a translator registered with ITI or CIOL, and if yours does, you need that supplier rather than a general translation company.
Every order is a word-for-word English translation, a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy on company letterhead carrying the company name, address, telephone number, date and a unique order number, a copy of the original document bound into the same PDF, and a public verification page the reader can check independently. That is the format both USCIS and UKVI describe. $19.95 per page in the US, £14.95 in the UK, delivered in minutes.
We cannot tell you whether a particular officer will accept a particular document — nobody outside that office can. We can tell you exactly what you receive, which is why the paragraph above lists it item by item.