What documents must be translated?

[swervetech69]

My wife is Taiwanese and we are currently filling out our immigration forms. It says on the Canadian website that all documents must be in English or french, but in the application it says just our marriage certificate, her brith certificate and household registary need to be translated. do they really expect me to get phone records, recipts from our wedding, rings, my work history and id in Taiwan all translated? That would cost hundreds of dollars.

 

[CharlieD10]

All government issued documents must be translated into English or French by a certified translator.

Other documents may be translated by yourself or another "uncertified" translator, especially where they are only "supporting" or "proof of relationship" type documents, such as chat logs, phone records etc. Untranslated documents will be given no "weight" or consideration in support of your application or the genuineness of your relationship.

 

[swervetech69]

That makes sence, any idea about how those informal translations should be done. For example can I just write beside my chinese phone records that "these are my phone calls from july 2009" in this case the numbers in the record speak for themselves. And i supose a brief description of the rundown of a wedding recipt would do as well? dont want to screw this up but not willing to go to ridicuilous ends either.

 

[AmericaninQuebec]

That makes sence, any idea about how those informal translations should be done. For example can I just write beside my chinese phone records that "these are my phone calls from july 2009" in this case the numbers in the record speak for themselves. And i supose a brief description of the rundown of a wedding recipt would do as well? dont want to screw this up but not willing to go to ridicuilous ends either.

I would provide a document attached to the phone records that gives a translation of the headings, labels, etc. so that they know what they're looking at when the see the list of numbers. Of course you'll want to translate locations or names of who was placing/receiving otherwise it won't help you much. I think doing a fairly accurate translation is better than a summary wherever possible. If you can't do it yourself there are plenty of websites out there where you can find a freelance translator who will do the translations for generally $0.07 to $0.12 per word.

 

[sidkrose]

We submitted a couple of bank statements and phone records in German and we simply translated the words right on the photocopy (right next to them) or we put little superscript numbers next to them and attached a note explaining each number. We also included some photocopies of letters in German from his parents to us, but we simply highlighted the names, showing who was corresponding with whom.