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Certified Chinese Passport Translation

Certified translation of the documents that establish identity and nationality in China, including the registry annotations and endorsements that carry the legal effect and that a reader unfamiliar with the system will otherwise skip.

Three passports, three jurisdictions

A PRC passport, a Hong Kong SAR passport and a Macao SAR passport are three different documents issued by three different authorities with different visa arrangements, and all three are Chinese nationality documents.

A holder of a Hong Kong SAR passport is a Chinese national with right of abode in Hong Kong, and the passport says so. We name the issuing authority and the region rather than describing all three as "a Chinese passport".

The hukou is where the data comes from

The biodata on a PRC passport derives from the hukou, the household register, and from the resident identity card. Where a name or a date has been changed, the change lives in the hukou and not in the passport.

So a passport and an older document disagreeing on a detail is explained by the hukou, and a US office assessing the discrepancy needs the hukou page. We translate them together where you send them.

Pinyin surname first, and the characters

The passport prints the name in pinyin with the surname first and no tone marks, so WANG XIAOMING is Xiaoming Wang and the surname is the first word. A US form reading the last word as the surname inverts it.

Different characters share a pinyin spelling, so two unrelated people can look identical in Latin letters. The characters are printed on the passport and we reproduce them, because they are what actually identifies the holder.

Travel permits that are not passports

Mainland residents travelling to Hong Kong and Macao use an EEP — an exit-entry permit — and travel to Taiwan uses a separate permit. Taiwan residents use a Mainland Travel Permit for the mainland.

These are not passports and translating them as one misstates what they are. We name the document. 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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