A Hijri Date, a Handwritten Correction, and a Name That Must Match the Passport
AR into EN: a certified translation of a Sudanese birth certificate for a US green-card filing, due in three days. The document gives the birth date only in Hijri form, 12/09/1444, with no Gregorian equivalent. A registrar has hand-corrected the day of birth, initialled the correction, and left no explanatory note. A round stamp partly covers the registration number; the month and year are legible, two digits are not. The child appears as «عبدالله محمد الطيب», but the child's passport and every prior filing read “Abdullah Mohamed Eltayeb.” The receiving agency asks for a “word-for-word” translation plus a certificate of accuracy.
1. How do you handle the date and the registrar's correction?
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I convert with a reliable Hijri–Gregorian tool and present both calendars, with the Hijri as written: “12 Ramadan 1444 AH (corresponding to [converted date])”. I do not present the conversion as if the document stated it.
Two caveats go in a translator's note. First, Hijri months begin on local moon sighting, so a conversion can be off by a day; where the agency needs a single civil date, that uncertainty is theirs to resolve, and a note saying so is honest rather than obstructive. Second, the registrar's handwritten correction: I translate the certificate as corrected, since that is the document's operative content, and I add one line noting that the day was amended by hand and initialled by the registrar, with the original entry legible or not as the case may be. Translating both readings without saying which governs would leave the officer guessing.
On “word-for-word”: I tell the requester that the phrase means complete and unaltered, not one-to-one substitution, and that a calendar conversion is an addition I am flagging as such.
2. How do you render the names, given the passport spelling?
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I transliterate what the document says - “Abdullah Muhammad al-Tayyib” under a consistent system - and I do not silently substitute the passport forms. Substituting would make the translation no longer a translation of that document, which matters when an officer compares it to the passport.
But I also do not leave the discrepancy to be discovered. A translator's note states: “The beneficiary's name appears as ‘Abdullah Mohamed Eltayeb' on his passport; the variants reflect differing romanization of the same Arabic name.” That single line pre-empts the request for evidence that otherwise follows a name mismatch in a green-card file.
The components driving the variation are ordinary: Muhammad/Mohamed, al-Tayyib/Eltayeb (the article assimilates before the sun letter), and spacing of the family name. The father's name gets the same treatment. If the client wants the translation to follow passport spelling throughout, that is their call and it should be instructed in writing, not assumed by me.
3. The registration number is partly obscured and the agency wants a clean document. What do you do?
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I translate what is visible and mark what is not. For the two illegible digits I use a bracketed indication such as “[two digits illegible - stamp overlaps]” rather than a best guess, and I note that a round stamp, whose text is or is not legible, partially covers the field.
Inventing or inferring digits from a sequence would produce a document that looks complete and is not - the worst outcome for a certified translation, because the certificate of accuracy now vouches for something I made up.
The client may push back: agencies dislike brackets, and a “clean” page is easier to process. The answer is that the bracket is information, not a defect, and that if the underlying number is needed, the fix is a fresh extract or a legible copy from the issuing registry, which is a client-side action. I say that in the delivery note so the request goes to the right place instead of back to me.