Certified Translation for an I-130 Petition: What to Submit

You are filling out Form I-130 for a spouse, a parent or a child, and the form itself is the easy part. The hard part is the pile of supporting documents: a birth certificate from one country, a marriage certificate from another, maybe a divorce decree that ends someone's prior marriage, and a few of them are in a language USCIS will not read. The instructions say a foreign-language document must come with an English translation, but they do not walk you through which of your papers that actually covers. Families routinely translate the beneficiary's documents, file the petition, and then get a Request for Evidence about a document belonging to the petitioner — the US side of the family, who happens to have been born abroad.

What the regulation actually requires

Everything USCIS asks of a translation sits in one short rule, 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3): a document in a foreign language filed with USCIS must be accompanied by a full English translation, and the translator must certify that the translation is complete and accurate and that they are competent to translate from that language into English.

That is the entire requirement. The rule does not ask for a credentialed or government-licensed translator. It does not ask for notarization. It does not ask for an apostille. What it does ask for is strict:

• Complete means the whole document, not the fields you think matter. Seals, stamps, marginal annotations, registrar signatures, the printed form text, the fee receipt stamped on the back — all of it gets rendered or described in English.
• Accurate means names, dates and places transfer exactly as written, including spellings that disagree with your other documents.
• Competence is the translator's own statement, signed and dated, with their name and contact information.

The practical output is a translated page that mirrors the layout of the original, plus a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. You file a legible copy of the foreign document and the translation together — USCIS accepts photocopies and scans, so you do not mail original civil records.

The documents in a typical I-130 filing

The exact set depends on the relationship you are proving, but a family petition is usually built from the same handful of records. Translate any of these that are not in English:

• The petitioner's proof of status. A naturalization certificate, US passport or green card is already in English. A foreign birth certificate used to show US citizenship through a parent is not.
• The beneficiary's birth certificate. Needed for parent, child and sibling petitions to establish the relationship, and commonly filed in spousal cases as identity evidence.
• The marriage certificate, for spousal petitions. This is the core relationship document, and a marriage certificate translation has to carry the registry book and entry numbers, not just the names and date.
• Divorce decrees or annulment judgments ending any prior marriage of either spouse. Courts write long; see the note on page counts below.
• Death certificates, where a prior marriage ended by death.
• Legal name change orders, adoption decrees, and legitimation records where the chain of names or the parent-child relationship is not obvious on its face.
• Police or court records, when they come up in the evidence you are submitting.

Relationship evidence you gather yourself — letters, chat logs, joint account statements, affidavits from family — falls under the same rule if it is in a foreign language. A bank statement in Spanish is a foreign-language document filed with USCIS.

The petitioner's own records, which nearly everyone forgets

Here is the gap that produces RFEs. A US citizen petitioner thinks of themselves as the American half of the case, so they translate the beneficiary's documents and file their own without a second thought. But a naturalized citizen was born somewhere else. So was a lawful permanent resident petitioning for a spouse or child. And several common petitions require the petitioner's own foreign birth certificate as evidence.

If the document proves something about the petitioner and it was issued abroad in another language, it still needs a certified translation.

Where this bites hardest:

• A US citizen petitioning for a parent. You prove the parent-child relationship with your birth certificate showing that parent's name. If you were born in Brazil, Guatemala or Korea, that is a foreign-language record going into a US filing.
• A citizen who derived citizenship through a parent and files a foreign birth certificate alongside a Consular Report of Birth Abroad or a citizenship certificate.
• Sibling petitions, where both birth certificates have to show the same parent and both may be foreign.
• A petitioner whose prior marriage ended abroad. Your foreign divorce decree is proof of your legal capacity to marry. It gets translated even though you are the one filing.
• Name discrepancies on the petitioner's side. If your naturalization certificate reads one way and your foreign birth record reads another, the translated birth record is what connects them, and the translation must show the original spelling exactly, not the Americanized version you use now.

Translating documents for both sides of the petition at the start is cheaper and faster than translating half of them, waiting months, and then responding to an RFE. If you are not sure which items apply to your relationship category, the USCIS certified translation page lays out the standard document sets.

Who may sign the certification, and why not your spouse

The regulation does not say the translator must be unrelated to you. It says the translator must certify competence and accuracy. So technically a bilingual cousin can sign.

The problem is that a petition is an adversarial-adjacent filing: you are asserting facts, and USCIS is deciding whether to believe them. The petitioner and the beneficiary are parties to the case. When one of them also signs the document that attests the evidence is faithfully rendered, the officer has to weigh evidence certified by the person who benefits from it. Nothing in the rule forbids it, and officers do accept such translations — but it introduces a question that costs you nothing to eliminate. We cover the reasoning in more depth in can you translate your own documents for USCIS.

The same logic applies to machine output. A translation produced by software and signed by a human who cannot read the source language is a competence statement that is not true, and it tends to show: machine translation mangles registry language, abbreviated civil-status terms and handwritten annotations. See using Google Translate for official documents for what goes wrong.

What a multi-document petition costs and how pages are counted

Certified translation at eVerbary is $24.95 per page, where a page means up to 250 words including numbers — not a physical sheet. That distinction matters for an I-130 bundle, because the documents behave very differently:

1. Birth certificates are usually one page. A dense civil registry extract with marginal notes can run to two.
2. Marriage certificates are typically one page, occasionally two when the record includes witness details and annotations.
3. Divorce decrees are the variable. A short foreign decree may be two pages; a judgment with findings of fact, property division and custody terms can be considerably longer. Upload the file for an exact count before you commit.
4. Death certificates and name change orders are generally one page.

Certified orders include the signed certificate, formatting that mirrors the original, PDF delivery and revisions. Notarization, physical mail and same-day delivery are optional add-ons priced at checkout. Full detail is on the pricing page, and you can get an exact figure for your specific bundle by uploading everything to a quote.

One thing worth stating plainly: our standard translation is the same $24.95 per page as certified. It is not a budget tier. The only difference is that it does not come with the Certificate of Translation Accuracy — which is precisely the thing 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) requires. For anything going to USCIS, choose certified.

Timing, and translating before you file rather than after

A one- to three-page document is typically delivered within 24 hours, and same-day delivery is available. Against USCIS processing timelines, translation is never the bottleneck — unless you discover a missing one after the fact.

The sequence that works:

1. Lay out every document you intend to file and sort them into English and not-English.
2. Check the not-English pile against both sides of the family, petitioner included.
3. Scan each one completely — front and back, every page, edge to edge, including stamps that run off the margin and anything written on the reverse.
4. Order the translations together so names are rendered consistently across the whole set. A single translator handling the marriage certificate and both birth certificates will not spell a surname two ways.
5. File each translation immediately behind its source document, not in a separate bundle at the end.

Consistency across the set is the quiet benefit of ordering everything at once. RFEs frequently come not from a mistranslation but from a petitioner named one way on the birth certificate, another on the marriage certificate, and a third on the divorce decree, with no translator's note explaining that these are transliteration variants of the same name. If an RFE does arrive, what happens if USCIS rejects your translation walks through the fix.

Frequently asked questions