Chinese No Criminal Record Certificate Translation for UK Visas

For applications from outside the UK, GOV.UK says: “You’ll need to provide a criminal record certificate” for the listed education, healthcare, therapy and social-services roles. Check the occupation and country-history rules on the Skilled Worker documents page; this is not a requirement for every job.

Two quite different documents travel under this name, and it helps to know which one you are holding. The police version comes from a 派出所 (local police station) or 公安局 (Public Security Bureau). Since 31 December 2021 it follows one national form set by the Ministry of Public Security: a certificate number, one paragraph naming the person checked with their nationality, ID type and number, the words 未发现有犯罪记录 (no criminal record found), a transaction number with a QR code, the issuing unit’s red seal and date, and three printed notes, the last saying it is valid for three months. Older or local versions can differ, and I translate whatever is printed. The notarial version comes from a 公证处 (notary office) and is a bound booklet with a cover, a certificate number written in the form 〔2025〕…字第…号, the notary’s signature and seal, and frequently an English page already bound in. If you are abroad, the 2021 rules let someone in China apply at the police station for you with your written authorisation. You can see the police form field by field in my Chinese criminal record certificate translation template.

People are often surprised that a bilingual notarial booklet may still need further translation. The English page inside it was produced by the notary office, not necessarily accompanied by an identifiable translator’s accuracy statement; it rarely covers the Chinese seals and annotations; and in my experience it sometimes contains outright errors in names and dates. What I supply is a complete translation of everything on the page — the Chinese side, the English side where the two differ, the seals, signatures and reference numbers — with my own certification statement, contact details and professional membership attached. If you are weighing up the two routes, my article on certified versus notarised translation in the UK sets out where each one belongs.

These certificates end up in employment vetting for roles involving children or vulnerable adults, professional registration, university and NHS onboarding, adoption and fostering assessments, and certain immigration routes, some of which ask for a criminal record certificate covering each country you have lived in for a qualifying period. Check the current guidance for your own route before you order anything from China, because the requirement is not universal and the certificates are troublesome to obtain from abroad.

The translation traps here are almost all about wording, and they are unforgiving. Chinese police certificates are drafted as negatives, and the exact negative matters. 无犯罪记录 states that there is no criminal record. 无违法犯罪记录 is broader and takes in unlawful acts short of a crime. 未发现犯罪记录 says only that no record was found. I keep those distinctions in English instead of flattening them into one reassuring sentence: a reviewer who compares your translation with hundreds of others will notice, and an inflated translation is far worse for you than an accurate one. Scope works the same way. Many police certificates confine themselves to the issuing station’s own jurisdiction, with a phrase such as 本辖区内, and that limitation stays exactly where it appears.

Then come the mechanical points. Office names have to be rendered consistently at every level of the address, from province down to the individual station. Resident identity numbers are transcribed digit by digit and cross-checked against the birth date they encode. Validity periods and issue dates are written out in full rather than in figures. Every seal is described where it sits, including the small departmental stamps people assume are decorative. Names follow your passport, always, with the characters shown beside them.

Send me a clear scan of the whole certificate — both sides, and every page of a notarial booklet including its cover — plus the spelling of your name on your passport and, if you know it, the name of the body that asked for the document. One useful warning: Hong Kong’s Certificate of No Criminal Conviction is a different animal entirely. It is in English already and the police send it directly to the requesting authority, so you may well not need me at all.