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When do you need a certified translation of your diploma or transcript?
The United States attracts a high number of international students every year. US universities are competing to get even more students from overseas, many of them offer scholarships in some fields such as technology and sports. If you want to make use of these opportunities, you need to pass an admittance process to enroll. Your diploma from a high school or university certifies your education level in your native country and makes you eligible for admission to a university in the United States.
Whether your goal is to further your university education to higher studies (from a Bachelor’s Degree to a Master’s Degree) or to attend college from high school, you need to have your diploma translated and certified when you apply to study in the United States.
If you have not graduated from high school yet, you need to get an academic transcript from your school to submit to colleges or universities within the United States. Universities or foreign credential evaluation services evaluate course titles, number of hours of each course, your credits and success/fail results, your averages as well as total scores for assessment of your level of education. This ensures a placement in the right educational category. For the purposes of this evaluation by your college or an evaluation service, a certified translation of your transcript is needed.
In case of transcript translation, it needs to be ensured that the subjects are represented accurately. Therefore the linguist needs to be familiar with academic terminology both in the source and in the target language, with the common educational course titles and descriptions as well as transcript abbreviations in order to provide the most accurate translation possible. An experienced translator also knows the variations of the subject titles in the source language and country and can choose the equivalent in the target language. For example, “Historia I” in some Latin American countries is represented as “History 101” in the US.
If you received your diploma or other certificate of education outside the United States and you are seeking employment in the United States, you also need an official translation to submit to your prospective employer or to an evaluation service.
What kind of diploma translations are required by US universities?
The translation of your diploma must be “word-for-word” without any interpretation or evaluation. This is required by all US universities, educational institutions, foreign credential evaluation services, licensing boards and World Education Services. This has to be an official translation signed and certified by an accredited translation service within the United States.
What is a certified translation?
A certified translation is completed by a professional translator who is eligible to issue a translation certificate. These certified translation services are legally responsible for their competency and the accuracy of their translations. As each country has its own jurisdiction, a certified translation completed by an eligible translator in that country is required for official purposes. That means that you need to have your certified English translation of your diploma completed in the United States if you want to get admitted to US universities.
A certified translator completes the diploma translation in a format that is required by US universities and educational institutions, signs and seals it to certify that it is an official translation. A certified translation completed this way creates a legal record.
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