Seals and certification marks must be translated too

This is the rule that almost nobody explains in advance, and it accounts for a large share of "your file is incomplete" letters. A translation must reproduce everything that appears on the document — not only the sentences, but the stamps, the round seal, the notarial note in the margin, the signature block, the handwritten registry number and the apostille attached to the back.

What counts as part of the document

From the reviewing officer's side, the document is the whole sheet. The text tells them what it says; the marks tell them that it is genuine and who issued it. A translation that carries only the first half asks the officer to take the second half on trust, which is exactly what they are not permitted to do.

So the standard is: if it is printed, stamped, embossed or written on the page, it appears in the translation, in the position it occupies on the original.

The elements dropped most often

1. The notarial certification note. Usually a dense paragraph on the reverse or on an attached sheet, in small type, with its own number and date.
2. The apostille. A separate certificate, often on the back or on an attached page, with numbered fields.
3. The round seal of the issuing office. Frequently overlapping the text and dismissed as decoration.
4. Marginal annotations on civil status records. Later entries about marriage, divorce or a name change — legally the most consequential lines on the page.
5. The verification block on an electronic document. The barcode caption, reference number and the sentence explaining how to verify the document.
6. The grading scale legend on a transcript. Usually printed on the reverse, and precisely what an evaluating body wants to read.
7. Reverse sides that appear blank. They rarely are; they carry a stamp, a number or a continuation.

How a mark is rendered

Translators normally describe rather than imitate, using a bracketed note in the position the mark occupies: a line indicating that a round seal appears there, followed by the text it contains. Signatures are noted as present without being reproduced. Where a stamp is genuinely illegible, that is stated rather than guessed — an honest note is acceptable; an invented reading is not, and it is the kind of error that surfaces when the officer compares the translation with the scan.

Why an incomplete translation is treated as a missing document

Officers work by comparison. They look at the scan of the original, then at the translation, and check that the two account for each other. Anything visible on one and absent from the other reads as a gap. The practical result is the same as if you had not sent the document at all: a request for further documents, and a file waiting on you. What happens when a translation is rejected describes the rest of that sequence.

The apostille is translated, so its timing matters

If your document needs an apostille, the apostille has to be on the document before the translation is made, otherwise the translation is missing a page from the moment it is finished. This is the ordinary reason to obtain the apostille first — see whether you need an apostille for Québec. Getting the order wrong means paying for the translation twice.

Scanning decides what the translator can see

A seal that is invisible in the scan will not appear in the translation. Scan in colour, flat, full page, both sides, at a resolution that keeps small print readable. Greyscale flattens the ink stamps that carry the certification; a phone photograph taken at an angle loses the edges where numbers usually sit. The scanning page covers this in detail.

What we supply so that nothing is dropped

Our part is upstream: obtaining the document in a form where the marks exist and are legible. That means the wet-signed registry extract rather than a home printout, the transcript with the university's own seal, the apostille applied by the competent Turkish authority, and a complete scan sent to you alongside the courier package. Whoever produces the translation then has a full document to work from, which is the only way the seals can end up in it. The page on electronic printouts explains when a wet-signed copy becomes unavoidable.