Translate Report Card
A term report from a school abroad, put into the language the receiving registrar reads, with the marks, the attendance column and the teacher comments kept where they belong.
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A term report is not a transcript, and registrars read it differently
A school issues one of these at the end of a term, a semester or a trimester. It covers a slice of one year, not a whole education, and it exists to tell a parent how a child is doing right now. That is a different job from the cumulative record a university registrar keeps, and it means the page is built out of different parts.
Most of them carry the pupil's full name and date of birth, the name and address of the school, the year group, the class or form, the period covered, a row for each subject taught with the mark awarded, a count of days present and days absent, a conduct or behaviour entry, free-text comments from the class teacher or from each subject teacher, and a line at the bottom saying whether the pupil moves up to the next year. The head teacher signs it and the school stamps it. On many of them there is a small legend, often on the reverse side, that explains what the marks mean.
That legend is the single most useful thing on the page for whoever receives it abroad, and it is the thing people most often forget to scan. If you send only the front of the card, the person on the other end is looking at a column of numbers with no key.
Marks that do not mean what an American reader assumes
School marking systems disagree about direction, range and where the pass line falls. A few examples of what turns up on the cards families most often need translated:
- Germany and Austria: 1 to 6, low is good
- A 1 is the top mark and a 6 is the bottom one. The pass boundary sits at 4. Half steps are written as 2+ or 3-, and a teacher may write a mark in words instead of digits, so sehr gut, gut and befriedigend appear where a number would otherwise be. A reader who assumes a higher number is better inverts the whole card.
- France: out of 20, and 20 does not happen
- Ten out of twenty is the pass mark. Marks above sixteen are unusual by design rather than by accident, so a 13 or 14 in a French bulletin is a strong result, not a mediocre one. The card also shows the class average beside the pupil's own mark, which is the context the number is meant to be read in.
- Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia: five points, two is a fail
- Five is excellent and two is unsatisfactory. One is available but rarely given. Because the useful range is so short, a 4 covers a wide span of performance, and teachers write 4+ or 5- to place a pupil inside it.
- India: percentages, letter bands and a ten-point average
- CBSE and state board cards may show a raw percentage, a band from A1 downward, and a cumulative grade point average calculated on a ten-point scale, sometimes all three on the same sheet. Which one the receiving school should use depends on the year and the board, and the card itself usually says so in the footnotes.
- England and Wales: numbers replaced letters
- GCSE results moved from letter grades to a 9 to 1 scale, with 9 as the highest. Older paperwork from the same schools still shows A* to G. Internal school reports frequently show a working-at grade and a target grade side by side, which is not a mark for work completed at all.
A translation renders the mark as it was written and reproduces the school's own legend. It does not restate a German 2 as a B or a French 14 as an 88 percent. Converting between marking systems is credential evaluation, a separate exercise that the receiving school or an evaluation service performs, and a translator who does it uninvited has replaced a fact with an opinion.
Year groups and subject names travel badly
Counting up, counting down
French secondary years run backwards. A pupil enters collège in sixième and works down through cinquième, quatrième and troisième before reaching seconde, première and terminale. Rendering sixième as sixth grade puts an eleven-year-old two years out of place. English schools count Year 1 to Year 13 continuously through primary and secondary. German schools use Klasse plus a number but split pupils across Gymnasium, Realschule and other school types at a stage that has no American parallel. The safe output keeps the original designation and adds the pupil's age or the school type beside it, leaving the placement decision where it belongs.
Subjects with no counterpart
Sachunterricht, Sozialkunde, éducation civique and moral science do not map onto a single American subject line. Translated word for word they read as something odd; translated loosely they turn into a subject the pupil never took. Naming them plainly and leaving the original title in brackets is more use to a registrar than a confident guess.
Conduct and attendance columns
Many systems mark behaviour, effort and punctuality on their own scale, which is often a different scale from the academic one on the same card. Absence may be split into excused and unexcused, or expressed in lessons missed rather than days. A district enrolment office reads these columns closely, so they need to carry over with their headings intact rather than being folded into a single figure.
Handwriting, stamps and the back page
Marks are often entered by hand, teacher comments almost always are, and the school stamp lands on top of the text it is meant to authenticate. Optical character recognition handles a clean printed grid well and struggles with all three. Photograph every side of the document, including the page carrying the marking legend, and keep the camera square to the paper.
Pricing for school paperwork
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Getting a term report ready for a new school
Most families are assembling several years of cards at once. Doing it in this order saves a second pass.
Gather every period, not just the last one
Registrars usually ask for the reports covering the last two or three years of schooling. Collect them all before you start so the pupil name, the school name and the subject titles come out worded the same way across the set.
Capture both sides of each card
The marking legend, the stamp and the head teacher signature are frequently on the reverse. A front-only scan produces a translation that a registrar cannot act on, and you will be asked for it again.
Upload and pick the languages
PDF, DOCX, JPG, JPEG and PNG are all accepted. Choose the language the school wrote in and the language the receiving school reads, then let the file process.
Check the mark column against the original
Open both side by side and confirm that every subject row still carries its own mark and that no half-grade notation was dropped. Then send the translation together with a copy of the original, which is what receiving schools expect.
A short walkthrough of the upload, if you would rather see it than read it.
Who receives it, and what each of them wants
- A school registrar or enrolment office. They are deciding which year group the pupil joins and which subjects carry across. A plain, complete translation with the marking legend attached is normally enough, and no certification is asked for.
- A district language assessment team. Where a pupil is being screened for language support, the reports show which subjects were taught in which language and for how long. The subject titles matter more here than the marks do.
- An international or private school admissions office. These often set their own bar and may ask for the translation to be certified, alongside a reference from the previous school.
- A consulate assembling a dependant visa file. Where a child accompanies a parent on a work or study visa, school records go into the application pack, and the consulate's own translation rules apply.
- An immigration filing. School records sometimes support a petition as evidence of a relationship or of where a family has been living. Anything filed with USCIS has to arrive as a complete English translation with a signed certification of accuracy attached.
- A scholarship or exchange programme. Selection committees read the teacher comments as closely as the marks, so free text should be translated in full rather than summarised.
Questions parents ask about school reports
Will the marks be converted into American letter grades?
No. The mark is reproduced as the school wrote it, and the school's own marking legend is translated alongside it. Turning a German 2 into a B or a French 14 into a percentage is credential evaluation, which the receiving school or an evaluation service carries out using its own conversion table. A translator who converts on your behalf has thrown away the original figure that the evaluator needs.
The card is handwritten and the stamp covers part of the text. Can it still be used?
Photographs and scans go through optical character recognition first, and printed grids come out well. Handwritten marks and teacher comments are much harder, and text under a stamp may not be recoverable at all. Shoot the page flat, in daylight if possible, at the highest resolution your phone offers, and check the output against the original before sending it on.
Do I need to translate every term, or only the most recent one?
Ask the receiving school first. Enrolment offices commonly want the reports covering the last two or three years, and some want only the final one for the completed year. Translating the whole set at once is usually cheaper per page and keeps names and subject titles worded consistently across the file.
Does a school report need a certified translation?
For ordinary public school enrolment, generally not. Certification tends to be asked for by private and international schools, by consulates assembling a visa file, and by immigration authorities. When it is required, the receiving body wants a signed statement from a human translator confirming the translation is complete and accurate. See how to get an official translation.
What about the year group? My child was in sixième.
The year designation is carried across as written and explained rather than renumbered. French secondary years count downward, English schools run Year 1 through Year 13, and German pupils are split between school types at a stage with no direct counterpart elsewhere. The registrar places the pupil using age, school type and the subjects already covered, so the translation gives them all three instead of guessing at a grade number.
Will tables, columns and the school layout survive?
Yes. The subject rows, the mark column, the attendance figures and the comment boxes come back positioned as they were, so a registrar can read the translated page against the original without hunting for matching rows. That also makes it obvious if anything failed to come across.
What does it cost for a few years of reports?
The $2 seven-day trial covers 10 pages or 3,000 words, which is enough for several term reports. Beyond that the Monthly plan is $14.99 for 100 pages or 30,000 words and the Annual plan is $135 for the year, about $11.25 a month, with extra volume at $0.005 per word. See pricing for the full comparison.
Get the school file ready this evening
Upload the reports, download them in the language the new school reads, and take the translation and the originals to the enrolment appointment together.
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