Passport and ID Translation for UK Visas, Banks and Employers

The international passport standard is the reason the photo page is usually fine: it asks issuing countries to label the data fields in English, French or Spanish alongside their own language, and to print the holder's name in Latin characters. The rest of the passport is a free-for-all. Observation pages record name changes, a spouse's name, religious names or corrections, often only in the national language. If UKVI needs to read one, it needs translating.

If you're not sure whether a page matters, check what your application relies on. Passport stamps from past trips rarely need translating; an annotation that explains why your name differs from your birth certificate usually does.

ID cards come up more often than people expect: as nationality evidence alongside a passport, as proof of identity for a dependant, or as a residence permit if you're applying from a country that isn't your own. UK banks may ask for certified translations of foreign identity or address documents when you open an account, and employers sometimes need them for onboarding or background checks. Most non-British workers now prove their right to work online with a share code, so a translation supports that check rather than replacing it.

The same documents travel abroad. Spanish authorities that need a foreign ID in Spanish generally expect a traductor jurado: see sworn passport and ID translation for Spain. For Japan, see passport and ID translation into Japanese.

Household registers record a family in one place: births, marriages, divorces, moves and sometimes deaths, all with dates and registration numbers. That makes them strong evidence of relationships and a densely packed translation job. We translate every page you submit, including entries for other family members, because a caseworker reads the record as a whole. It is the only document in most visa files that keeps track of a relative's change of address in a different decade.

Names are the hard part. Chinese, Japanese and Korean names have several possible romanisations, so we follow your passport spelling for you and the spelling in your family members' passports where you give them to us.

Two different problems tend to get lumped together. A spelling variant is the same name written two ways, often because different officials used different transliteration rules. A name change is a different name, after a marriage certificate, a divorce or a court order. Telling us your passport spelling when you order handles the first. The second needs the document that made the change, translated in full.

Tell us your passport spelling when you order and we'll use it across every document in the order. Translating your degree certificate, payslips or bank statements in the same order keeps the spelling consistent everywhere UKVI looks.

There's no surcharge for scripts such as Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic, and the statement of accuracy and PDF delivery are included. An ID card plus a two-page household register extract comes to £46.77.

If you need the translation today, same-day rush is £29.99 per page.