French to English Certified Translation

A certified French to English translation is a complete English version of your French document, issued with a signed certificate of accuracy from the translator stating the work is true and complete. That is what a US agency means when it asks for one, and at Eagle Translate it costs 24.95 for a page of up to 250 words, delivered in 2 to 3 business days, covering French records from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Haiti and francophone Africa.

Ask the mairie for the copie intégrale, not the extrait

A French acte de naissance exists in three forms and the choice matters more than the translation does. The copie intégrale reproduces the whole register entry including the parents. The extrait avec filiation gives a summary with the parents named. The extrait sans filiation leaves the parents out altogether.

An agency that needs to see parentage will not accept the version without filiation, so ordering the wrong one costs weeks before a translator is ever involved. The copie intégrale is also the version that carries the marginal notes in full. The livret de famille is a family record book and is convenient, but it is not the register entry and is often refused where the acte itself is required. Confirm what the receiving office asks for, because its instructions govern.

Mentions marginales carry the rest of the story

Down the left of a French acte sit the mentions marginales, added over a lifetime. They record a marriage, a divorce, a PACS and its dissolution, an adoption, a change of name, a nationality decision and finally a death. Each entry names the place and the date and often the court involved.

Those lines are the reason a French acte issued last month can look different from the copy issued ten years ago, and they are precisely what an immigration officer reads to confirm a prior marriage ended. A translation that renders the body of the acte and treats the margin as clutter is incomplete. Every mention is translated in place, in the order it appears.

Nom de naissance, nom d'usage and several prénoms

French law keeps a person's birth name as their legal name for life. A married name is a nom d'usage, a name in use, and it never replaces the nom de naissance on the register. So a French woman's acte de naissance shows her maiden name even after forty years of marriage, while her US driver's licence shows her married name, and the two documents look contradictory to anyone unfamiliar with the system.

Given names create a second issue. An acte lists all the prénoms recorded at birth, sometimes four or five, and the first is usually the one the person actually uses. A compound name joined by a hyphen, such as Jean-Pierre or Marie-Claire, is one prénom and must not be split across a first name box and a middle name box. French registers have also historically printed names in capitals without accents, which is why LEA and Léa turn up on documents belonging to the same person. A certified translation carries each name exactly as its document shows it.

Dates written out in words, and the 24 hour clock

Modern French records write dates day first, so 04/09/1997 is 4 September 1997. Older actes write the whole thing out, in a formula such as l'an mil neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix, le trois mai, à quinze heures trente. Three details in that line trip up a casual reader. Legal French uses mil rather than mille in a date. Quatre-vingt-dix is ninety, built as four twenties and ten, and soixante-quinze is seventy five. Birth times run on the 24 hour clock, so quinze heures trente is half past three in the afternoon.

A careful translation keeps the written form rather than compressing it into a short numeric date, since the reviewer is matching your English page against a French one they cannot read. Numbers follow the French convention too, so 1 500,50 uses a space for thousands and a comma for the decimal.

Marks out of 20 and what a mention means

French education marks out of 20, and the scale does not behave like an American percentage. Ten out of twenty is the pass. A 14 is a good result, a 16 is excellent, and a perfect 20 is close to unheard of. On the baccalauréat and on university results the numerical average is paired with a mention, running passable, assez bien, bien and très bien.

A certified translation of a relevé de notes, a diplôme du baccalauréat, a licence or a master reports the marks and translates the mention. It does not convert anything into a US grade point average, because that is credential evaluation and a separate service. Attestations de réussite, which confirm a degree before the diploma itself is printed, are translated on the same basis. Our services page shows how each document is priced by its own word count.

French documents from outside France

French is French, but the paperwork around it is local. Belgian records come from a commune, may be printed in French and Dutch on the same page, and carry a numéro de registre national. Dutch is also one of the eight languages on our languages page, so a bilingual Belgian document is not a problem.

Quebec issues certificates and copies of acts through the Directeur de l'état civil, and records before 1994 sit in parish registers with their own handwriting and abbreviations. Haitian applicants usually send extracts from the Archives Nationales. Across francophone Africa a birth that was never registered at the time is often evidenced by a jugement supplétif, a court judgment standing in for the missing register entry, and that judgment has to be translated as the court wrote it, complete with its case number and the tribunal that issued it.

Stamps, signatures and the apostille

A French acte carries the République Française heading, the name of the commune, a dry seal, the signature of the maire or of an officier de l'état civil, and phrases such as certifié conforme. All of that is part of the document. Where a signature cannot be read, the translation says the signature is illegible rather than inventing a name.

If your document has an apostille attached, include it in the upload. It is a numbered page of official text and agencies generally expect to see it in English alongside the record it certifies. It counts toward your page total, which is measured from your actual file so the price is on screen before you pay.

Price, turnaround and what happens if something is rejected

Certified translation is 24.95 a page of 250 words with delivery in 2 to 3 business days. Premium is 39.95 a page and is translated ahead of other work for delivery in 1 to 2 business days. Standard at 19.95 is a professional translation without the certificate, delivered in 3 to 5 business days, suitable for business and personal use but not for an official filing. Online orders run up to 50 pages, and for anything larger you can contact us for a quote.

If a translation is rejected because of a translation error we made, we correct it at no charge. If the corrected translation is rejected again for that same error, we refund what was paid for it, provided you notify us within 30 days with the written rejection. The full wording is in our refund policy, and any recipient can check a certificate on our verification page.

Ordering a French to English certified translation

Upload your PDF, choose French to English, pick a service level and pay by card. The four steps are described on how it works, the wider question list is on our FAQ page, and the German equivalent of this guide covers German to English certified translation if you have paperwork in both.

Have your copie intégrale, relevé de notes or jugement ready as a clear PDF and start an order. The exact price appears before you pay, and a certified translator takes it from there.