Passport Translation Services
A travel document is built to a single worldwide standard, which changes what translating one actually involves. Upload the identity page, the stamped pages or the whole booklet and get a readable version with the machine-readable zone and the document number untouched.
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Max. file size 1 GB
One booklet, four kinds of page
Travel documents are issued to a specification maintained by the International Civil Aviation Organization, and every compliant booklet in the world shares the same skeleton. That is unusual and it is useful, because it means the work divides cleanly. Different pages need completely different treatment, and knowing which is which is most of the job.
- The identity page. Photograph, document type, issuing state, document number, surname, given names, nationality, date of birth, sex, place of birth, dates of issue and expiry, and the issuing authority. Under the standard, the field labels here are already printed in more than one language, so this page is often the least in need of translating and the most in need of accurate transcription.
- The machine-readable zone. Two lines of fixed-width characters across the foot of the identity page, set in a font designed to be scanned. It repeats the fields above in a rigid layout, in capital Latin letters, digits and a filler character, with check digits computed over several of them. It is not language and it is never translated.
- The visa and stamp pages. Border stamps, residence permits, visa vignettes and entry refusals. This is where the translatable content usually lives, and where the evidential value lives too, because a run of stamps is a record of where somebody physically was.
- Observations and endorsements. A page for annotations by the issuing authority: a former name, an amendment, a note about a child included in the document, an extension of validity, a restriction on use. These are written in the national language only, and they can materially change what the booklet permits.
Ask the receiving body which of the four it needs. Many want only the identity page; a naturalisation caseworker counting days of residence wants every stamped page, which is a much bigger job.
Why the two lines of code at the bottom are copied, never rendered
The machine-readable zone is the part people are most tempted to tidy up and the part that must be left exactly alone. Each character sits in a fixed position, so inserting or removing one shifts every field after it. The check digits are computed from the characters around them, which means a single altered symbol makes the whole line fail validation at a border desk or in a bank's onboarding system.
It is also where the official spelling of a name is fixed. The zone permits only unaccented capital letters, so diacritics are dropped or expanded according to published tables: a German sharp s becomes a double letter, a Scandinavian slashed o becomes a plain one, an accented vowel loses its accent. That stripped form is not a mistake and it is not a better spelling. It is a machine encoding of the name printed above it, and both belong in the output as they appear.
The document number, the three-letter state code and the nationality code follow the same rule. They are identifiers rather than words, and they pass through character for character.
The identity page sets the spelling for everything else
Whatever is printed here becomes the reference version of a person's name and origin for the whole application, which is why four small things repeatedly cause trouble.
Romanisation is already decided
A name written in Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew or a South Asian script has several defensible Latin spellings, and the issuing authority already picked one. That choice governs. Everything else in the folder has to agree with it, so a translation of any other document is checked against this page rather than the other way round.
Place of birth is historical
A birthplace is recorded as the town was named at the time, and as the state existed then. Booklets in circulation today name cities and countries that have since been renamed, merged or dissolved. Silently modernising one erases the link to the birth record, so the printed form stays and any current name goes beside it in brackets.
Where the surname ends
Naming conventions differ enough that the split between family name and given names is not obvious to a reader from elsewhere: two surnames in much of the Spanish-speaking world, a patronymic in its own right in several others, a chain of ancestral names in Arabic practice. The identity page separates them into named fields, and the output has to keep them in those fields rather than running them together.
Dates in mixed notation
Many issuers print a three-letter month abbreviation in two languages precisely to avoid the ambiguity of an all-numeric date. Where a booklet does use digits only, and where a calendar other than the Gregorian one appears, the day and month order has to be resolved rather than reproduced hopefully. Writing the month as a word settles it.
Stamps are evidence, not decoration
A border stamp is small, inked by hand onto a patterned background, and frequently overlapping its neighbours. It is also the only proof many people have of when they entered and left a country. Naturalisation rules that count days of physical presence, tax residence tests and applications to remove a residence condition all turn on reading these correctly.
A typical impression holds the name of the port or crossing, a date, an arrow or a symbol showing direction of travel, a transport mode marker for air, land or sea, and an officer or booth number. The port name is a place and stays as printed; the rest is what needs explaining to a reader who has never seen that country's stamp design. Where an impression is genuinely illegible, saying so is the honest output, because guessing a date on an entry record is worse than leaving a gap the caseworker can chase.
Visa vignettes and residence permit stickers are the opposite problem: dense, structured and full of category codes that mean something specific under the issuing country's rules. Codes come across as codes and the surrounding text is translated around them. If a permit or an entry clearance is central to your case, our visa translation page goes further into that document type.
Four steps, and the first one decides the result
Laminate, holograms and a curved spine make a travel document one of the hardest things to photograph well. Get that right and the rest is routine.
Scan flat, without flash
The identity page is covered by a laminate with a holographic overlay, and direct light bounces straight back into the lens, washing out the exact characters that matter. Use even indirect light, press the booklet flat so the text near the spine is not curving away, and fill the frame with the page.
Decide how much of the booklet you need
One page or forty is a different job entirely. Identity page only is the common request; a residence or citizenship application counting days usually needs every page that carries an impression, blank pages included so the sequence is provably complete.
Upload and set the language pair
Open an account with an email address, then send the pages in one job. Name the language the booklet was issued in, not just the language you need, because stamp abbreviations and endorsement wording only resolve once the source is known.
Verify the fixed strings
Read the document number, the two machine-readable lines and the dates against the original character by character. Then check the name spelling against every other document going into the same file. A mismatch found now costs a minute; found by a caseworker it costs a resubmission.
What it costs, by how many pages
An identity page on its own is tiny. A full booklet with years of stamps is a real page count, so decide the scope first and then pick from the options below.
Choose Your Plan
Start with a 7-day trial for $2, then $14.99/month, or save more with annual billing
7-Day Trial
MOST POPULARthen $14.99/month after trial ends
- 7-day full access trial
- Trial limit: 10 pages or 3,000 words
- $0.005/word AI translation
- 120+ languages
- PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, IDML, TXT, JPG, PNG, CSV, JSON
- Team access & custom glossaries
- Email support
Monthly
POPULARRegular price $29.99, now 50% off
- 100 pages or 30,000 words per month
- $0.005/word AI translation
- 120+ languages
- Unlimited file storage
- PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, IDML, TXT, JPG, PNG, CSV, JSON
- Team access & custom glossaries
- Priority email support
Annual
SAVE 25%~$11.25/month, save 25% vs monthly
- 100 pages or 30,000 words per month
- $0.005/word AI translation
- 120+ languages
- Unlimited file storage
- PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, IDML, TXT, JPG, PNG, CSV, JSON
- Team access & custom glossaries
- Priority email support
Identity pages, before and after
Enlarge a thumbnail to compare the two. Worth looking at in each pair:
- Field labels and their values remain paired on the same lines.
- The document number and the coded lines appear unchanged.
- Stamps and printed security patterns stay visible rather than being erased.
- The page reads as a document rather than as a picture of one.
Each of these came out of a single upload, with no retyping afterwards.
See all translation examples →Watch it happen once
From choosing the scan to downloading the result, in a couple of minutes.
Identity records that travel together
Questions about travel documents
My identity page already shows English labels. Do I need this at all?
Often less than you think. The worldwide standard requires the field labels on that page to appear in more than one language, so the fields themselves are usually readable already. What is not readable is the observations page, the endorsements and the stamps, all of which are written in the national language only. Ask the receiving office which pages it wants before paying for the whole booklet.
What happens to the two lines of code at the bottom of the page?
They are reproduced exactly and never interpreted. Every character sits at a fixed offset and several positions hold check digits computed from their neighbours, so adding, removing or substituting one symbol breaks the validation that border and banking systems run. The same applies to the document number and the three-letter country codes.
Why is my name spelled without its accents in that block?
Because the encoding permits only unaccented capital letters. Published tables define how each accented character is expanded or stripped, so an eszett becomes a double letter and a slashed vowel becomes a plain one. It is a machine form of the name printed above, not an error, and both versions appear in the output as they appear on the page.
I need every entry and exit stamp read for a residence application. Is that realistic?
It is, and it is the most demanding version of this job. Impressions are small, hand-applied, overlapping and printed over patterned paper. Scan each page flat at high resolution and include the pages with no stamps, because a caseworker counting days needs to see that the sequence is complete. Where an impression truly cannot be read, the honest output records that rather than guessing a date.
Will a consulate or a bank accept an automated translation?
For your own reading and for assembling a file, yes. For submission, consulates, immigration authorities and most financial institutions require a certified translation with a signed accuracy statement from a qualified translator, and some also want a notarised copy of the original page. Use the professional option for the copy you hand over.
My photocopy has glare across the middle. Will it still work?
Glare is the single most common problem with this document, because the laminate and its holographic overlay reflect straight back at a flash. Reshoot in even indirect daylight with the booklet pressed flat, and check on screen that the document number and the coded lines are sharp before uploading. A clean scan removes almost every difficulty that follows.
What formats can I send, and how big can the job be?
JPG, JPEG and PNG images, image-only and text PDFs, and Word files if you have already assembled the pages into one. A single upload can run to 1 GB or 5,000 pages on a paid plan, which is far beyond even a heavily stamped booklet photographed page by page.
How is the price worked out for a booklet?
By volume, so scope drives cost. Seven days of access is $2 with an allowance of 10 pages or 3,000 words, which covers an identity page and a handful of stamped ones. A monthly plan at $14.99 raises the allowance to 100 pages or 30,000 words, an annual plan costs $135, and anything above an allowance is charged at $0.005 a word.
Upload the pages you actually need
Identity page, stamped pages or the full booklet, translated with the document number, the coded lines and the name spelling preserved exactly as issued.
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