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Certified Vehicle Import Document Translation

Get your vehicle import document translated into English by a professional human translator, with a signed certification accepted by USCIS, courts and universities. Flat $24.95 per page and a 100% USCIS acceptance guarantee.

The folder that travels with an imported car

Bringing a vehicle into the United States means presenting its history to customs and then to a state DMV, and most of that history is in another language:

• The foreign title or registration certificate
• The bill of sale or purchase invoice
• An export certificate where the exporting country issues one — Japan's export deregistration certificate is the one importers meet most often
• Evidence of the date of manufacture: a build certificate, a manufacturer's letter, the data on the compliance plate
• Shipping documents, and the seller's or shipper's correspondence when customs asks about valuation

Why so much of this paperwork is old

Vehicles at least twenty-five years old are exempt from the federal motor vehicle safety standards, which is why an enormous share of imported-car paperwork is decades-old Japanese and European documents — faded, stamped many times over, often partly handwritten.

On those documents the date of manufacture is the single most consequential figure on the page, because eligibility is counted from it. We translate that date exactly as the document gives it, converting Japanese era years individually rather than by rule of thumb, and we mark anything genuinely illegible as illegible. A guessed manufacture date is a guessed eligibility, and nobody should be guessing at that.

What we translate and what we do not

We translate the foreign documents. The federal forms an importer files — the DOT and EPA declarations — are completed in English by you or your customs broker, and filling them in is their job and yours, not a translator's.

After customs comes the DMV, which will want the same documents in English to issue a title, plus your driver's licence. Sending the whole folder at once keeps names, numbers and dates identical across every page an official compares.

How it works

Upload a photo or a scan of your document, pick the language pair and check out online. You never have to mail originals: a legible copy is all we need.

A professional human translator, never machine translation, translates the document word for word and mirrors the layout of the original. Every certified translation ships with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy that meets the requirements of USCIS, courts and universities.

Your translation is delivered digitally, usually within 24 hours for documents of one to three pages, and same-day delivery is available. If anything needs adjusting, we revise it.

Certified vs. standard translation

A certified translation is a word-for-word translation accompanied by a signed statement attesting to its accuracy and completeness. It is what official bodies require: USCIS, courts, universities and government agencies. Certified translations are $24.95 per page, where a page is up to 250 words.

A standard translation is for business or personal use where certification is not needed, such as CVs, client intake forms or marketing material, and is billed at $0.10 per word.

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