Transcript Translation Requirements: What Schools Want

You have the transcript in hand — a sheet of paper from a university in Bogotá or Hanoi or Kyiv, with course names, credit hours, and a grading key printed at the bottom in small type. The admissions page says "official transcripts with certified English translation." Another page on the same site says "course-by-course evaluation required." A third mentions WES. None of them explains whether those are the same thing, three things, or two things and a suggestion. Meanwhile the deadline is fixed and the registrar back home takes weeks to answer email.

This is the single most confused area in document translation, and the confusion is not your fault. Universities use the terms loosely. What follows is what each term actually means, who is supposed to produce each document, and the specific errors that get transcripts sent back.

A translation and an evaluation are not the same document

Two separate deliverables, produced by two separate kinds of provider, for two separate purposes.

A certified translation is a faithful English rendering of what is printed on your transcript. Every course title, every grade, every credit value, every stamp and signature line, laid out to mirror the original. It comes with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy stating that the translation is complete and accurate and that the translator is competent to translate from that language into English. The translator adds nothing and interprets nothing.

A credential evaluation is an analysis. An agency — WES, ECE, SpanTran, and others — looks at your institution, checks its accreditation status in its home country, and issues a report saying what your credential is equivalent to in the US system and, in a course-by-course report, what each of your grades converts to on a 4.0 scale. That report is an opinion about equivalence. It is not a translation, even though the agency may include one or require one from you.

A translator tells the school what your transcript says. An evaluator tells the school what it means. Confusing the two is the fastest way to buy the wrong service twice.

Some evaluation agencies accept documents in the original language and handle translation in-house. Others require you to submit a certified English translation alongside the original before they will open your file. Check that policy before you order anything, because it determines your order of operations.

Course-by-course versus document-by-document versus literal

Three phrases float around admissions instructions and they refer to different things.

• Literal or word-for-word translation — this is what a certified translation is. The source text in English, nothing added, nothing interpreted. This is what eVerbary provides through diploma and transcript translation.
• Document-by-document evaluation — an evaluation agency confirms that your degree is equivalent to, say, a US bachelor's degree. It does not list your individual courses. Commonly enough for employment or general admission.
• Course-by-course evaluation — the agency lists every course, assigns US credit hours and letter grades, and calculates a cumulative GPA. Graduate programs, licensure boards, and transfer admissions usually want this one.

If the instructions say "course-by-course," a certified translation alone will not satisfy them — but you may still need the translation first, because the agency needs to read the document. If the instructions say "certified English translation," an evaluation report will not satisfy them either, because the report is the agency's summary rather than your transcript.

Why grades must stay exactly as printed

This is where well-meaning translations go wrong. A translator who sees a 7/10 from a Brazilian federal university, or a *bien* from a French institution, or a 4 on a Russian five-point scale, and helpfully writes "B" in the English version has produced a document the school cannot use.

The reason is jurisdictional. A 7/10 is not a B in any universal sense. In some systems it is a strong result; in others it is barely a pass. Deciding what it equals in US terms is an evaluative judgment, and the person who signed the Certificate of Translation Accuracy has no authority to make it. Worse, if the evaluation agency later converts the grade itself, its report will conflict with the translation in the same file.

The correct approach:

• Grades appear exactly as on the original, in the original notation.
• The grading key or scale printed on the transcript — often on the reverse side, often in tiny type — is translated in full. Admissions officers rely on it.
• Credit units stay in the source system's terms. ECTS credits stay ECTS credits. *Créditos* stay as the number shown.
• Course titles are translated as written, not mapped onto the nearest US course name.
• Anything the translator cannot read gets marked [illegible] rather than guessed at.

If the reverse side of your transcript holds the grading legend, scan it and submit it. Transcripts arrive incomplete more often for this reason than for any other.

What US schools actually put in writing

There is no federal rule governing university transcript translation the way 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) governs immigration filings. Each institution writes its own policy, which is why the instructions differ so widely. Read the exact page for your program rather than the general international admissions page.

Across most schools, the recurring requirements are:

• A complete translation. Every page, both sides, including seals, footnotes, and marginal notes.
• A translation produced by someone other than the applicant or a family member.
• A signed certification from the translator or translation company attesting to completeness and accuracy.
• The original-language document submitted alongside the translation, so the reviewer can compare them.
• For "official" transcripts, delivery directly from the issuing institution — a requirement about the original record, not the translation.

That last point trips people up. "Official transcript" refers to the chain of custody of the source document: the registrar sends it, sealed or electronically, to the school. Your translation does not have to travel that route, and a translation company cannot make a transcript official. It can only translate what you send.

If you are still building the wider application file, our guide on certified translation for university applications covers diplomas, recommendation letters, and financial documents alongside transcripts.

The rejections that happen most often

Patterns repeat. Almost every one of these is preventable in five minutes.

1. The grading key was left out. The transcript was translated; the legend on the back was not scanned. The reviewer sees numbers with no interpretive frame and returns the file.
2. Grades were converted. A helpful translator or a bilingual relative rendered numeric marks as US letter grades. The school flags it as an unauthorized alteration.
3. The formatting does not match. Course codes, semesters, and credit columns were reflowed into a paragraph. A reviewer comparing the two documents side by side cannot follow it. Formatting that mirrors the original is not cosmetic — it is how verification works.
4. A family member signed the certification. Translation was fine, impartiality was not. Same principle we cover in translating your own documents.
5. Machine output was submitted. Course titles in technical fields go badly wrong in automatic translation, and stamps and handwritten notations are skipped entirely.
6. Only the final-year page was translated. Multi-year transcripts must be translated in full, including semesters where the student withdrew or failed.
7. The wrong service was ordered. The applicant paid for a translation when the program required an evaluation, or the reverse, and discovered it after the deadline.

Sequencing it so nothing gets ordered twice

Work backward from what the program asks for.

1. Find the exact wording on the admissions or graduate program page. Print it. If it names an evaluation agency, that agency's own document policy now governs your next step.
2. Read the agency's submission rules if an evaluation is required. Some want documents in the original language sent directly from your institution; some require a certified English translation from you; some do the translation themselves for a fee. This decides whether you order a translation at all.
3. Request the complete record from your registrar — all pages, both sides, all years, plus the grading scale. Get it before you order anything.
4. Order the certified translation if it is required, submitting clear scans of every page. At $24.95 per page, where a page counts up to 250 words including numbers, a typical multi-year transcript runs a few pages because transcripts are dense with numbers.
5. Add notarization only if the school named it. A notary confirms who signed, not whether the content is accurate — the distinction is laid out in certified vs. notarized translation.
6. Submit the original and the translation together, in the format the school specifies — uploaded PDF, emailed, or mailed.

Most one- to three-page documents come back within 24 hours, and same-day delivery is available at checkout if a deadline is closer than that. If you are unsure how many pages your transcript will count as, send the scans through a quote request and you will get the page count before you commit.

Frequently asked questions