Portuguese to English Certified Translation

A Portuguese to English certified translation is a complete English version of your Brazilian or Portuguese document, produced by an ATA certified translator and issued with a signed certificate of accuracy, which is what United States agencies, universities and courts ask to see. Eagle Translate prepares them from a PDF you upload, at 24.95 per page for the Certified level, delivered in two to three business days.

What is included in a certified Portuguese to English translation

Every word on the page is translated, and that means the parts people forget as well as the body text. Round registry stamps, the state control seal, handwritten marginal notes, signature blocks and small print on the reverse all appear in the English version. Anything that cannot be reproduced is described inside square brackets, so the reader sees [seal of the Cartório de Registro Civil das Pessoas Naturais] rather than a blank space. Text that is genuinely unreadable is marked as illegible rather than guessed.

The layout follows the original closely, so a reviewing clerk can hold the two documents side by side and find the same field in the same place. Attached to the translation is a signed statement that the translation is complete and accurate and that the translator is competent to translate from Portuguese into English. That statement is issued under the company ATA certificate, and it carries a reference number the recipient can check at our certificate verification page. If you want the general background first, what is a certified translation covers the basics.

Brazilian documents that come in most often

• Certidão de nascimento, the birth certificate, in the older cartório format or the current national standard
• Certidão de casamento and certidão de óbito, marriage and death certificates
• Carteira de identidade, the RG, and the CPF taxpayer registration
• Carteira Nacional de Habilitação, the driving licence
• Carteira de Trabalho e Previdência Social, the work and social security record
• Histórico escolar and diploma from a Brazilian school or university
• Certidão de antecedentes criminais from the Polícia Federal, and state level criminal record certificates
• Escrituras, procurações and other notarial deeds

Livro, folha, termo and the 32 digit matrícula

Brazilian civil records are issued by a cartório de registro civil das pessoas naturais, and each certificate identifies itself by the book, the sheet and the entry, written as livro, folha and termo. Current certificates also carry a 32 digit matrícula that encodes the registry office code, the year, the type of act and the entry number, and many carry a numbered selo de fiscalização, the state control stamp.

Those identifiers are how a receiving office ties the translation back to the original record, so they are carried across digit for digit and never summarised or rounded. The same discipline applies to the cartório name, the district, the state and the name of the officiant who signed.

Names, accents and the parentage on a Brazilian birth certificate

Names are never translated or stripped of their accents. Gonçalves stays Gonçalves, and João stays João. Brazilian and Portuguese naming usually gives a person two or more surnames drawn from both parents, and a Brazilian birth certificate lists both parents in full and, in most formats, all four grandparents under avós. All of that is reproduced exactly as printed, because a US caseworker is comparing those names against a passport and a visa application.

If your passport spells a name differently from your birth certificate, say so through our contact page when you order, so the difference can be handled properly in the translation rather than discovered later.

Documents from Portugal read differently from Brazilian ones

Portuguese records come from a conservatória do registo civil rather than a cartório. Instead of an RG and a CPF you have a cartão de cidadão that carries several numbers on one card. A criminal record check is a certificado do registo criminal issued through the Ministry of Justice, and a full birth record is often supplied as a certidão narrativa completa rather than a short extract.

European Portuguese also keeps spellings and turns of phrase that Brazilian Portuguese does not, and official language in Portugal is denser and more formal. The translator works in the variety the document is written in, which is why the source country matters when you place the order. Portuguese is one of the eight languages on our languages page, and every pair inside that set is available.

Transcripts, diplomas and how grades are handled

Brazilian schools and universities grade from 0 to 10 and record carga horária in class hours for each disciplina. Portuguese secondary and higher education grade from 0 to 20, with higher education transcripts also showing ECTS credits. A certified translation reproduces those marks exactly as they appear and translates the grading legend so the reader can interpret the scale.

What a certified translation does not do is convert a Brazilian 8.5 or a Portuguese 16 into a US grade point average. That conversion is credential evaluation, a separate service performed by an evaluator, and evaluators normally ask for the certified translation as an input before they begin. Ask the receiving school which order they want the two steps in, because their instructions govern.

Apostilles on Brazilian and Portuguese documents

Brazil joined the Hague Apostille Convention in 2016, and apostilles are issued there by authorised notary offices. Portugal issues apostilles through the public prosecution service. In both cases the apostille is a separate page written in Portuguese, and receiving offices in the United States very often want that page translated as well.

Include the apostille in the same PDF you upload. It is counted in the page total, and it is far cheaper to translate it now than to send a second order later.

What it costs and how long it takes

Pricing is per page, and a page is up to 250 words of real text rather than a sheet of paper. A sparse cartório certificate on a large decorative sheet is usually a single page. The three levels are 19.95 per page with delivery in three to five business days, 24.95 per page with delivery in two to three business days, and 39.95 per page with delivery in one to two business days. Our services page sets out what each level includes.

Upload a PDF and the price is measured from the real document and shown to you before you pay by card. Orders run up to 50 pages, and above that get in touch and we will handle it directly. How it works walks through the four steps, and the FAQ answers the questions that come up most.

If the translation is rejected

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. You need to tell us within 30 days and send the written rejection. The full wording is on the refund policy page.

Rejections for other reasons are worth checking before you assume the translation is at fault. A missing apostille, a short form certificate where the recipient wanted the long form, or an expired criminal record check are all common, and none of them are translation problems.

Upload your Brazilian or Portuguese document at start an order. The price appears before you pay, and the certified translation comes back with the certificate attached.