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Certified Chinese Bank Statement Translation

Certified translation of the documents that evidence bank accounts and balances in China, including the registry annotations and endorsements that carry the legal effect and that a reader unfamiliar with the system will otherwise skip.

An unstamped statement is not evidence

A Chinese bank statement — 银行流水, the transaction flow record — is only treated as genuine when it carries the branch's chop, the red seal, applied at the counter. A statement printed at home or downloaded from an app has no standing.

Consulates and US offices reviewing Chinese financial evidence look for that seal first. We describe each chop, translate its text and say where it sits, because a US reader given a red impression reads it as decoration.

The balance certificate is a different document

Alongside the flow record, Chinese banks issue a 存款证明 — a deposit certificate — which states a balance held as of a date and commonly freezes the funds for a stated period. That freeze is the point: it proves the money is real and still there.

Visa applications frequently require the certificate rather than the statement, and the freeze end date is on the document. We translate it prominently, because a certificate whose freeze has lapsed proves less than the applicant thinks.

Amounts, and the characters for figures

Chinese financial documents write amounts in Arabic numerals and frequently also in formal capital characters — 壹 貳 叁 for one, two, three — which exist specifically to prevent alteration. Both appear and they should agree.

Chinese also groups large numbers by ten thousand (万) rather than by thousand, so 50万 is 500,000. A translation that mishandles that is off by an order of magnitude, and we give the figure in Western notation with the currency named.

The name, and the account

Chinese bank records show the holder's name in characters, while a passport shows pinyin. Different characters share a pinyin spelling, so matching a statement to a passport needs the characters reproduced rather than only transliterated.

We keep the characters and the pinyin. The account number and the branch name are reproduced exactly. See our Chinese page.

Ordering, and what the certification covers

Upload the document, choose certified translation at $24.95 per page of up to 250 words, and it comes back typically within 24 hours as a PDF formatted to mirror the original, with a signed certificate of translation accuracy on letterhead. Marginal annotations are translated in place, in the margin, and every seal, stamp and registry endorsement is translated with the text. See how we translate and certified versus standard.

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