Passport and ID Translation for New Zealand Immigration

Passport photo pages follow an international standard, and most include English alongside the national language. Where yours does, a clear copy is normally enough. Passports entirely in another script, or carrying a name-change or observation note in the national language only, are a different matter: INZ needs to read those in English.

It's one of the rare corners of a visa application where the paperwork has already done some of the work for you. Our guide on documents that are already in English explains how bilingual documents are handled.

INZ uses identity documents to confirm who you are and that your name and date of birth match across the application. The translation has to be independent: not by you, a family member or your immigration adviser. It should be certified as correct, signed or stamped by the translator or translation business, and submitted with a copy of the original. These are the identity documents we most often translate for New Zealand applications:

Registers such as the Chinese hukou or the Japanese koseki record a whole family in one document: names, dates of birth, relationships and changes over time. That makes them useful to INZ, which needs to see how everyone in an application is connected, and long to translate, because every entry and annotation counts.

We translate every page you upload, including amendment stamps and household-head details. A register that runs to many pages is priced per page like everything else, and the quote form shows the exact cost before you pay. Registers are thorough to a fault; somewhere in there is probably a note about a cousin's change of address in 1994.

The standard option is a company-certified translation with a signed statement of accuracy on letterhead, at £16.79 per page, with rush delivery within 8 hours at £29.99 per page. The named-translator option at £41.99 per page is signed by a professional translator who gives their full name, contact details and qualifications; INZ asks visitor visa applicants for exactly those details about the person who translated their documents.

Both options are delivered by the next working day as standard and appear in the facts box on this page.

Names are where applications quietly come apart: a passport uses one spelling, a birth certificate transliterates it another way, and a household register manages a third. Tell us your preferred spelling when you order so the translation matches your passport. Our guide to names spelled differently across documents goes into more detail.

Every document includes 2 free revisions, and the PDF arrives ready to upload. Start on the quote form.