The actual regulation is one sentence. Here is what it says, what it does not say, and what really gets translations rejected.
There is a great deal of marketing noise about what USCIS demands from a translation. The actual rule is one sentence long, it has not changed in years, and knowing it will save you money. Here it is, along with what genuinely gets translations rejected.
8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) — “Any document containing foreign language submitted to USCIS shall be accompanied by a full English language translation which the translator has certified as complete and accurate, and by the translator's certification that he or she is competent to translate from the foreign language into English.”
Read it closely, because four things follow from it that the industry would rather you did not notice:
The immigration court equivalent, for cases before EOIR rather than USCIS, is 8 CFR 1003.33, and it works the same way.
There is no prescribed form, but every valid certification includes these elements. If your translation is missing any of them, it is vulnerable:
We are regularly asked to fix translations that were rejected somewhere else. The pattern is consistent, and credentials are almost never the cause.
By a wide margin the leading cause. A Soviet-era birth certificate has a round seal, a registry book reference, a serial number printed on the form, and frequently endorsements on the reverse. A translation that renders the names and dates but silently drops the seal text is not a full translation, and an officer who notices has a clean basis for a Request for Evidence.
Central Asian names can be transliterated several defensible ways — Хуршид can become Khurshid, Hurshid or Xurshid, all legitimately. What matters is that the translation matches the spelling on the applicant’s passport and prior filings. If the translator picks a different valid spelling, the officer sees two different people. Send us your passport spelling with the order and we conform to it.
Sometimes the certificate is absent entirely; more often it is present but omits the competence statement, or is unsigned, or is undated.
The regulation requires the foreign-language document to be there too. This is a filing error rather than a translation error, but it lands on the translation.
Where a stamp is smudged or handwriting is unreadable, the correct practice is to mark it [illegible]. A translator who guesses at what it probably said has introduced a statement into the record that the original does not support — which is far worse than the gap it fills.
Anything in the file that is not already in English. For the common family-based and humanitarian filings, that usually means:
A note on scope: we are a translation company, not a law firm. We do not give legal advice and we cannot tell you which documents your particular case requires — that is a question for your attorney or accredited representative. What we can tell you, precisely, is what a compliant translation of those documents looks like.
8 CFR 103.2(b)(3): ‘Any document containing foreign language submitted to USCIS shall be accompanied by a full English language translation which the translator has certified as complete and accurate, and by the translator’s certification that he or she is competent to translate from the foreign language into English.’ That is the whole of it.
No. There is no USCIS-approved translator list, no registry and no accreditation requirement. Any website claiming to be ‘USCIS certified’ or ‘USCIS approved’ is using language that has no official meaning. What is certified is the translation, by the translator — not the company, by USCIS.
The regulation permits any competent person to translate, including a family member. In practice this is risky: officers have discretion to question translations where the translator has an interest in the outcome, and a family-member translation invites that scrutiny. For a filing that matters, use a disinterested third party.
Yes. The regulation says the foreign-language document must be ‘accompanied by’ the translation — meaning both go in together. Sending the English translation alone is one of the most common causes of a Request for Evidence, and it is entirely preventable.
In our experience, in order: an incomplete translation that omits seals, stamps or a back page; a missing or defective certification statement; names transliterated inconsistently with the passport; the translation submitted without the original; and invented text where the original was illegible. Translator credentials are almost never the issue.
No. USCIS does not require notarization. We include it free because other institutions do require it, but for a USCIS filing specifically, the certification alone satisfies the rule.
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