Certified birth certificate translation in Singapore, accepted by ICA — first time.

Photograph both sides of the certificate, send it to a certified translation company, approve the fixed quote, and receive a signed English version with a certification page attached. The whole thing normally takes one to two working days. You cannot do it yourself — ICA will not accept a translation prepared by the applicant or a family member, however good the English is.

A standard single-page certificate is S$30 flat, including the certification page, second review and free island-wide courier. Order two or more together and each drops to S$28. Notarisation adds S$50 regardless of page count, and the full apostille chain for overseas use totals around S$200.

Three options: your country’s embassy in Singapore, a notary public, or a certified translation company. Our office is at Suntec Tower One, four minutes from Promenade MRT, but almost every client uses WhatsApp or email instead — nothing about the process requires you to travel.

A certified translation is enough for the great majority of ICA submissions. Some authorities write it as a notarized translation — same act, American spelling. Notarisation is needed only when your acknowledgement letter uses the word explicitly, when the certificate will be used outside Singapore, or when it forms part of court proceedings. Send us the letter first — around one in four people who ask for notarisation do not need it.

Yes. Surat Beranak and Sijil Kelahiran issued by JPN are among our most frequent jobs. Older handwritten Malaysian certificates, registrar endorsements on the reverse and correction stamps are all handled routinely, from S$30. Being a Malay speaker yourself does not remove the requirement — ICA still needs the record in English.

Send a photo of the 出生医学证明, front and back. A native Chinese translator handles it, describing the red seals in full — issuing bureau, shape and register number — and matching your name romanisation to your passport rather than imposing standard pinyin. Simplified and Traditional are both routine, as are Taiwan Minguo dates.

Yes, along with the other Indian regional languages. Many Indian municipal certificates print headings in English while the registrar’s entries stay in Hindi or Tamil — in that case only the non-English parts need translating, which costs less than a full page. Send a photo and we will tell you which it is.

All of them. Vietnamese Giấy khai sinh, Thai สูติบัตร, Burmese မွေးစာရင်း and Bangla জন্ম নিবন্ধন are weekly work for us. Thai and Burmese dates arrive in Buddhist Era and Nepali records in Bikram Sambat — all converted to Gregorian with the original kept in brackets.

Yes, provided it is certified. ICA does not publish an approved-vendor list, so no agency can honestly claim to be on one. What is required is a translation carrying a signed accuracy declaration naming the translator and the company behind it. Ours has been accepted on the first submission 99.4% of the time since we began tracking in 2018.

An official translation of birth certificate documents is one issued by a party who can be identified and held responsible — an embassy, a notary public, or a translation company that certifies its work. The page must carry the translator’s name and qualification, the language pair, the company’s details, the date, and a signature over a company stamp.

A clear photo or scan is enough for the translation itself. ICA may separately ask to sight your original at the counter, which is between you and the officer. The only job that needs the physical document in our hands is a certified true copy, where a notary compares the copy against the original.

In almost all cases, yes. Handwritten records from the 1960s to 1980s are routine for our senior translators. What matters is the image: flat on a table, natural light, no shadow falling across the seals. If a character genuinely cannot be read, we flag it before starting rather than guessing at it.

We reproduce the name exactly as printed on the certificate — we cannot substitute your passport spelling — and add a translator’s note connecting the two. Tell us at the start which document the translation will sit beside. Unexplained name variation causes more query letters than anything else on this page.

Our certification carries no expiry date and a birth certificate is a permanent record, so the same signed PDF can normally be reused for later applications. Where a receiving authority applies its own three- or six-month recency rule, we reissue with a fresh date for a nominal fee rather than retranslating from scratch.

The same requirement applies: a certified translation from an identifiable translator or company. Marriage certificates are the document most often ordered alongside a birth certificate, and sending both together is cheaper and lets the reviewer check that names and dates reconcile across the pair. See our marriage certificate translation page.