Korean to English Certified Translation for USCIS

If you were born in Korea, married there, or studied there, almost every civil record you need for a US immigration filing arrives in Korean — a 가족관계증명서 from a district office, a 기본증명서, a university 성적증명서 with the registrar's seal in the corner. What trips people up is not the translation itself but the details around it: which certificate to request, how to spell a name that has three plausible English versions, and what to do with the thirteen-digit number printed near the top of every Korean civil document.

What 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) actually says

The entire rule is this: any 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.

Read carefully, that means:

• No credential is required. The rule does not mention ATA membership, a degree, a Korean government license, or any approved-provider list. USCIS does not maintain one.
• No notarization is required. The signature belongs to the translator, and nothing asks a notary to witness it.
• Complete means complete. Seals, stamps, the issuing office's name, marginal annotations, fee stamps — if it is on the page, it belongs in the translation.
• The translation must be in English, not a romanized rendering of Korean.

Everything else you may have read online is a practical convention or someone's guess. For the certificate itself, see our guide to certified translation.

The rule is about accountability, not credentials: someone has to put their name on the accuracy of the English text.

Which Korean certificate you actually need

Korea abolished the old hojeok (호적) household register and replaced it in 2008 with the family relations registration system. Instead of one register, you request individual certificates, each showing a different slice of the same record:

• 기본증명서 (Basic Certificate) — the person's own details, plus entries such as death or adoption.
• 가족관계증명서 (Family Relation Certificate) — the person plus parents, spouse and children. This is what usually stands in for a birth certificate.
• 혼인관계증명서 (Marriage Relation Certificate) — marriage and divorce entries, with the spouse's details.
• 입양관계증명서 — adoption records.

Two practical points. Each certificate comes in a 일반 (general) and a 상세 (detailed) version, and only the detailed version shows past entries such as a prior marriage. And if your event predates 2008, the record may exist as a hojeok extract (제적등본) — a removed-register copy with vertical columns and classical Chinese characters, which needs a translator who can read it rather than one who reads only modern Korean.

Translate the certificate as issued. USCIS officers see Korean records routinely and expect them to look Korean; the English version should mirror the original's layout, table for table.

Names: passport spelling and the 이/리 problem

김영수 can be Kim Young-soo, Kim Yeong-su, Kim Youngsoo or Kim Young Soo. Revised Romanization gives one answer; a passport may give another, because passport spelling has historically followed the holder's preference. Relatives with the same surname sometimes hold passports reading Lee, Yi and Rhee.

1. Match the passport. Where the document names the person filing or being petitioned for, use the spelling on their passport and USCIS forms.
2. Keep it consistent across documents. If the birth record says Lee and the marriage record says Yi, an officer has to reconcile them.
3. Let a translator's note carry the difference. A bracketed note recording that the Hangul reads 이영수 documents the choice instead of hiding it.
4. Don't silently reorder. Korean writes surname first; it should be evident which element is the family name.

The same applies to places. 서울특별시 강남구 is Gangnam-gu, Seoul, not an invented equivalent.

The resident registration number and the rest of the page

Every Korean civil document carries the 주민등록번호 (RRN) — thirteen digits as YYMMDD-NNNNNNN. Certificates issued for overseas use often mask the last six or seven digits with asterisks, because Korean privacy law restricts full disclosure.

The handling is simple and it matters: reproduce what is on the page, exactly as it appears. If the original shows 900215-1\*\*\*\*\*\*, so does the translation. Do not fill in masked digits from another source, reformat the number, or drop it because it looks sensitive.

The same discipline applies to the issuing office and officer's title, the 발급번호 issue number used for online verification, the 정정 correction stamps beside handwritten changes, and any reign-year or 단기 dates on older records, which need conversion with the original notation preserved. Numbers count toward the 250-word page, so digit-heavy records affect the page count in our per-page pricing rather than the treatment.

Where Korean documents show up in a filing

• Family relation certificate in place of a birth certificate.
• Marriage relation certificate or the marriage report for a spousal petition — see marriage certificate translation.
• Detailed marriage relation certificate where a previous marriage ended. Divorce by agreement is confirmed by the family court, so there may be a 협의이혼의사확인서; a litigated divorce produces a judgment needing divorce decree translation.
• Criminal record certificate (범죄·수사경력조회 회보서) from the National Police Agency, where a consular process asks for one.
• Diplomas and transcripts for employment-based filings, with their own conventions around grading scales and seals.

You do not need to mail originals. USCIS accepts a legible photocopy or photograph of both the foreign-language document and its translation, so a clear phone photo is enough to start the translation and enough to file.

Doing it yourself, and why bilingual relatives usually can't

If you read and write Korean, translating your own family relation certificate looks like the obvious way to avoid a fee. That instinct is not wrong about language ability — it is wrong about who the certification is for.

The certification is a statement made to a government agency by someone with no interest in the outcome. When the person who benefits from the filing signs the accuracy statement, the statement stops doing any work. The same objection applies, more softly, to a spouse or a sibling named on the same certificate. The usual result of a rejected self-translation is a Request for Evidence, which costs weeks. We go through the reasoning in can you translate your own documents for USCIS.

There is a quieter problem too. Fluent speakers who have never worked with civil registry records tend to paraphrase — calling a 가족관계증명서 a "birth certificate," collapsing a table into prose, skipping seal text because it looks decorative. Each is a completeness failure, even when the Korean was understood perfectly.

What a compliant Korean translation looks like

• Every Korean page has a corresponding English page with the same table structure, headings and order.
• Seals and signatures are described, not reproduced, in a bracketed note stating what they say and where they sit.
• Illegible elements are marked [illegible] rather than guessed at or omitted.
• A Certificate of Translation Accuracy names the language pair, identifies the document, and carries the signed statement of completeness, accuracy and competence.
• Names, dates and numbers match across the whole set.

That is the deliverable on every USCIS certified translation we produce, at $24.95 per page of up to 250 words, certificate included. Notarization is available if another institution in your process demands it, though USCIS does not. To see the page count before committing, send your records through our Korean to English translation page.

Frequently asked questions