Asylum & International Protection Translation UK

Documents Requiring Translation for Asylum Applications

• Identity documents — passport, national ID card, travel documents
• Birth and marriage certificates — civil registry documents in any language
• Police records or arrest warrants — evidence of persecution or criminal targeting
• Court documents — judgments, charges, or proceedings in country of origin
• Medical reports — documentation of injuries, torture, or psychological assessment
• News articles or official reports — country of origin evidence (COI) documents
• Employment or education records — supporting evidence of background and identity

Languages Covered

We translate asylum documents from all major languages including: Arabic, Farsi/Dari, Pashto, Tigrinya, Amharic, Somali, Oromo, Kurdish (Kurmanji/Sorani), Urdu, Bengali, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, and many more.

How It Works — Our Asylum Translation Process

The workflow is designed around two realities of asylum casework: representatives often work to short tribunal deadlines, and the documents themselves are sensitive. Every step below is handled inside our own team — no offshore agencies, no third-party marketplaces, no unvetted freelancers touching claim material.

1. Submit documents securely. Upload scans through the SmartQuote form or send via WhatsApp to +44 7752 154028. Photos taken on a phone are fine provided the text is readable. If a document is under a legal-aid solicitor or accredited representative, tell us at this stage so we can align invoicing.
2. Fixed quote quickly. We count pages the way the Home Office counts them (single A4 side, whether typed or handwritten), apply add-ons if any, and confirm turnaround in writing. No estimates that later shift, no surprise charges once we have the file.
3. Translation by a qualified translator. Work is assigned to a translator with prior asylum, tribunal or country-of-origin experience in the source language. The translator signs a confidentiality undertaking and works to Para 39B format from the outset — Statement of Accuracy, translator name, credentials, contact details and translation date on every page.
4. Independent second-eye review. Every asylum translation is proofread by a second linguist before certification. This catches transliteration inconsistencies in names of persons and places (which matters enormously for identity documents and country evidence), date-format issues and any wording that could be read as embellishment of the source.
5. Certified PDF delivered. Delivery is by email as a signed PDF with the Statement of Accuracy on the final page. Hard-copy delivery is available on request (+£10 flat, Royal Mail Signed For). Where the case is going to an appeal bundle, we format for direct insertion — page numbers preserved, source alongside translation on request.

Pricing

One flat per-page rate for asylum work. No urgent-tier premium unless the case genuinely needs it; when it does, we quote on request rather than applying a standing surcharge. Reduced-fee arrangements are available on legal-aid asylum work where the solicitor is billing under the Legal Aid Agency Immigration and Asylum contract.

Standard turnaround follows the same page-band model as the rest of our UK translation work: 1 to 3 pages within 24 hours, 4 to 6 pages within 36 hours, 7 to 10 pages within 48 hours, longer bundles by written confirmation. For hearing-driven work we treat the tribunal date as the deadline and reverse-engineer from there.

Home Office Confidentiality and Handling of Sensitive Material

Asylum casework routinely involves accounts of persecution, violence, sexual and gender-based harm, torture and detention. That material carries obligations well beyond ordinary translation. Every person who touches an asylum file inside our team has signed a written confidentiality undertaking specifically covering protection claims. Files are transmitted over encrypted channels, stored on UK-based infrastructure, and deleted from working systems once the certified PDF has been delivered and the applicant confirms receipt.

We do not send asylum work to overseas subcontractors, do not use public machine-translation services on any part of a claim (this is a common route by which sensitive detail leaks into training data), and do not retain copies once the file is closed unless the instructing representative asks us to. If your solicitor requires a signed non-disclosure agreement in addition to our standard undertaking, we will sign it before receiving the documents.

For claims involving named perpetrators, witnesses still in-country, or ongoing risk to family members, tell us at intake. We can suppress names in filenames, keep the file off internal ticketing systems, and route it directly to a single named translator with no wider team visibility. This is standard practice for protection work and we treat it as the default rather than an upgrade.

Documentation Commonly Translated for Asylum Claims

Every asylum claim looks different. Below is the shape of what typically arrives on our desks, grouped by evidential purpose. If your document is not on the list, send it anyway — we translate for representatives across Britain and the range of source material is very wide.

Identity and civil status

• Passports and national ID cards — internal biodata pages, entry and exit stamps, endorsements and any handwritten notations. Non-Roman-alphabet transliteration follows the Home Office preferred convention (ICAO for machine-readable zones, standard scholarly transliteration in the body).
• Birth certificates and family books — often the primary evidence of nationality where a passport was not issued or was surrendered. Iranian shenasnameh, Iraqi civil status ID, Syrian family books and Eritrean baptism records are handled routinely.
• Marriage and divorce records — needed where family unity, dependent claims or gender-based persecution are engaged. Religious and civil versions both accepted; we flag any discrepancy between the two.

Evidence of persecution

• Witness statements — from the applicant, family members, community leaders, former colleagues. Frequently handwritten. We preserve the tone of the source and never paraphrase or "clean up" testimony.
• Court and police documents — arrest warrants, summonses, indictments, judgments, detention orders. These are jurisdiction-specific and translator selection reflects that: Iranian revolutionary court output, Turkish specially authorised court files, Egyptian state security paperwork.
• Party membership cards and political material — where imputed or actual political opinion is the claimed Convention ground.
• Threat letters, social-media screenshots, WhatsApp messages — increasingly common. We translate the visible text and include a translator's note on any metadata (timestamps, sender names) that appears in the source.

Medical and forensic

• Medico-legal reports — foreign hospital records, physiotherapy and psychology notes, torture-scarring documentation. Translator selection matches subject expertise: medical vocabulary is not something a generalist should be attempting on a Rule 35 file.
• Death certificates — where the claim engages loss of family members, blood feud or targeted killing.

Country and situational evidence

• News articles and government statements — from country-of-origin sources, translated for objective-evidence bundles.
• NGO and human-rights reports — where the original is not already in English.
• Academic and religious credentials — where these support a claim of imputed profile (journalist, activist, convert, apostate).

Statement of Accuracy and Para 39B Compliance

Paragraph 39B of the Immigration Rules requires that any document submitted in a language other than English be accompanied by a full translation certified by a qualified translator, giving the translator's name and contact details, the date of translation, and confirmation that it is an accurate translation of the original. Every asylum translation we issue meets those requirements on every page, not just on a cover sheet.

The Statement of Accuracy appears at the foot of the final page and includes: (a) the translator's full name, (b) professional credentials (typically Chartered Institute of Linguists, Institute of Translation and Interpreting, or equivalent recognised body), (c) a signed declaration that the translation is a true and accurate rendering of the source, (d) date of translation, and (e) our contact details as the issuing body should the Home Office or tribunal wish to verify. For representative-instructed work, the invoice reference and matter number can be added at the solicitor's request.

Where a Statement of Truth on the source document must be replicated in the target language (for example a witness statement being served in the appeal bundle in both languages), we handle that as part of the translation rather than a separate certification exercise.

Tribunal Deadlines and Hearing Timelines

Substantive interview decisions, appeal directions from the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), and further submissions all run on short timescales that leave little room for translation delays. If a hearing date is set, tell us at intake — we plan backwards from the date the bundle must be served, not from the day the file lands with us.

For representatives working under Legal Aid Agency contract deadlines on further submissions, we can commit to a delivery window in writing at the point of quote so it can be relied on in a Rule 3A extension request if needed. We do not use the word "guaranteed" against a delivery time — the Immigration Rules do not, and neither do we — but our track record on hearing-driven work is one we ask solicitor clients to judge us by. Where a document arrives late enough that the standard band cannot be met, we say so on the quote and propose the earliest realistic delivery, not an optimistic one.

Same-day certified translation is available for short identity documents and letters where these are needed for asylum registration, screening interviews or urgent detention releases. Contact us before uploading if you need a same-day slot — capacity is limited and we prefer to confirm availability rather than take work we cannot deliver.

Legal Aid, Representative Instruction and Litigants in Person

We work directly with solicitors, OISC-regulated advisers and legal-aid firms across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Where an accredited representative is instructing us, invoicing can be raised to the firm rather than the applicant and we will co-operate with any legal-aid billing requirements the firm has under the Immigration and Asylum contract.

Litigants in person are welcome to instruct us directly. If you are running your own asylum claim without a solicitor and are unsure which documents genuinely need certified translation, tell us in the SmartQuote form and we will steer you sensibly rather than translate documents that will not help the claim. For asylum-seekers on Section 4 or Section 95 support who need translation but cannot fund it, tell us — there is sometimes flexibility to arrange payment through a supporting organisation or on a pay-on-decision basis.

If you are looking for a solicitor rather than a translator, we cannot represent you but we can signpost. The Law Society solicitor-finder, ILPA member directory and Right to Remain toolkit are the standard starting points; we will send you those links on request without any onward referral or commercial interest.