Guides · 2026-09-09
A notice arrives, it mentions your translation, and the natural reaction is to buy another one immediately. Before you do: about half the time, the translation is not what went wrong.
Immigration notices are formulaic, and the formula tells you which category you are in.
"The translation is incomplete" / "not a complete translation of the document." Something on the page was not translated. Usually it is a seal, a stamp, a marginal annotation, the reverse side, or a signature block. This is a translation problem and it is fixable. It is also the single most common one, because the parts that get skipped — margins and stamps — are exactly the parts that carry the decisive facts.
"The certification does not contain..." The statement of accuracy was missing something the rule requires: a declaration of competence, the translator's signature, the date, contact details. The translation itself may be perfect. Fixable, and it does not require re-translating anything.
"Submit a certified translation of..." — naming a document you did not send at all. This is not a translation problem. You are missing a document.
"The document submitted is not..." — you filed an abridged extract where the full record was required, or a certificate that has expired, or a document type that country's authorities do not issue for this purpose. No translation fixes this. Go back to the issuing registry.
Names or dates do not match across your filing. This one is ambiguous. It may be a transcription error in the translation, which is fixable — or it may be a genuine difference between your own documents, which needs an explanation rather than a correction. See our note on names spelled differently across documents.
Can: missing content, untranslated seals and annotations, a wrong date or number, a missing or defective certification, a translation that summarised where it should have transcribed, or one that reformatted a table so values shifted rows.
Cannot: a document that says something other than what you need it to say; a document that has expired; a missing apostille; the wrong version of a civil record; a filing that needed a document you have not obtained yet.
The distinction matters because the second list is where money gets wasted — a second and third translation of the same wrong document, when the actual next step is a request to a registry.
Send us the notice. If it was rejected for reasons attributable to the translation itself, we revise it free of charge or refund the order in full — that is written into our terms, and the notice is what lets us see which category the problem is in.
If we read the notice and conclude the translation was fine and the problem lies elsewhere, we will tell you that, even though it means we are not selling you anything. A second identical translation would take your money and leave you exactly where you are.
You can still use the checklist above; it is not specific to us. If the notice points at the certification wording or at incompleteness, any competent certified translation fixes it, and you do not need to go back to the original supplier if you would rather not.
What you should not do is add a notarisation and resubmit unchanged. That is the most common reflex, and against USCIS or UKVI it addresses neither of the two things the notice was likely to have said.