I am a certified translator with the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) (Membership number 00024532), a Chartered Linguist with the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) (CIOL number: 72852), and a member of the American Translators Association (ATA) (Member number: 273323).
ITI is the only UK-based membership association providing a professional home for practising translators, interpreters and all those involved in supplying language services.
The Chartered Institute of Linguists is the UK’s Royal Charter body for language professionals and linguists.
RexTrans is listed on GOV.UK to provide translation services for British nationals in China.
The American Translators Association (ATA) is the largest professional association of translators and interpreters in the United States with nearly 8,500 members in more than 100 countries.
If you were born in mainland China and a UK office has asked to see your birth certificate, what they need is a certified English translation of your 出生医学证明 (chūshēng yīxué zhèngmíng, Medical Certificate of Birth). I produce that translation myself, as an ITI-certified Chinese to English translator: £30 per page of 250 words, delivered as a signed PDF within 24 hours, with notarisation available as an add-on if the receiving body asks for it. The same applies to the older 出生证明 and to a notarial birth certificate (公证书) obtained from a Chinese notary office.
The document most people send me is the green booklet that mainland hospitals have issued since the mid-1990s. It carries a printed serial number, a watermark, the newborn’s footprint and the mother’s thumbprint, and a red seal from the delivering institution. It has been redesigned several times over the years, so a 1998 booklet, a 2010 booklet and one issued last month do not look alike — the field order shifts, and some editions carry a detachable stub (副页) used for household registration. The information a UK reader needs is almost always the same:
UK bodies that routinely ask for this in English include UKVI on family and settlement applications, HM Passport Office when a child born in China is registered as a British citizen or applies for a first passport, register offices, school admissions teams, the NHS, and solicitors handling probate or family proceedings. None of them read Chinese, and none of them can act on a document they cannot read, so the translation is not a formality — it is the only version of your certificate they will ever see. If your family is also dealing with travel documents from China, my piece on British passport renewal from China covers the wider document set.
Three things go wrong on birth certificates more often than anything else. The first is names. Because the booklet has no Latin spelling, the romanisation is a decision, and it must match the passport exactly — including surname order, any hyphen, and the older Wade-Giles or dialect spellings some families have used for decades. Tell me the passport spelling and I use it, with the characters shown alongside. The second is 民族: it means ethnic group (Han, Hui, Zhuang and so on) and sits directly beneath 国籍, nationality. Rendering both as nationality is a common error and produces a document that contradicts the passport. The third is the seals. A caseworker needs to know what those red impressions say, so every stamp, the embossed serial number and the footprint boxes are described in place rather than quietly dropped.
Dates are a smaller but real trap: 2003年5月4日 is 4 May 2003, and I write dates out in full so nobody has to guess whether 05/04 means May or April. A certificate reissued after a loss carries a 补发 (reissue) annotation that must be visible in English. And if your document comes from Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan it is a different instrument altogether — Hong Kong birth records are already bilingual, while a Taiwanese 出生證明書 uses traditional characters and its own layout.
For a quote, send a clear photograph or scan of every page, including the reverse and the stub if it is still attached, plus the exact spelling of each name as it appears in the passport. I confirm the page count and the price before I start, and revisions are included if the receiving body queries anything.
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Certified translations are often required for official purposes such as submissions to UK universities, courts, government agencies, and more.
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According to GOV.UK, your document must be certified by a professional or a person well-respected in your community (‘of good standing’). The person you ask should not be:
– Related to you
– Living at the same address
– In a relationship with you
In practice, UK authorities tend to recognize documents certified by authoritative translators, which can reduce the risk of rejection and save you time. You can minimize errors, omissions, or rejection by using a translator or translation company affiliated with a recognized professional body, such as the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), or the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL).
Not quite, and the difference is worth knowing before you submit it. The Chinese Medical Certificate of Birth is issued by the hospital that delivered the baby and records clinical detail — birth weight, length, gestational age, the delivering institution — alongside the parents’ details. A British birth certificate is a civil registration extract. Both establish who was born, to whom and when, which is what a UK caseworker needs, but the layout looks unfamiliar to them. My translation keeps the Chinese structure and labels every field, so the reader can see exactly what the issuing hospital certified.
The Medical Certificate of Birth only came into general use in the mid-1990s, so people born earlier often have no hospital booklet at all. The usual route is a notarial birth certificate (出生公证书) from a Chinese notary office, drawn from the household register and archived records. Some families also hold an old hand-written hospital 出生证明 or a work-unit letter. I translate any of these, and if you send photographs of what you have I will tell you which document a UK body is most likely to accept before you pay for anything.
The price starts from GBP30.
Our rates vary depending on the complexity and length of the document as well as the required turnaround time. We provide a free, no-obligation quote upon reviewing your document, ensuring that you know exactly what the translation will cost before proceeding.
The number of pages for certified translations is determined by the total word count of the document. A single page is considered to be 250 words or fewer, including any numerical data.
If a page exceeds 250 words, we will adjust the calculation accordingly based on the word count. At that point, you will need to request a quote from us.
Find out more about how pages are calculated.
The process begins with you sending us a scan or a clear photograph of your document. We then translate the document and provide a certification statement that attests to the accuracy of the translation and the qualifications of the translator. The certified translation is then stamped with our official seal and mailed to you.
Usually yes. The English page bound into a Chinese notarial booklet is produced inside the notary office, not by a translator a UK body can identify, and it typically leaves the seals, the notary’s certificate number and any handwritten annotations untranslated. I have corrected genuine errors in those pages — wrong dates, wrong name spellings. What I supply is a full translation of everything the booklet contains, Chinese and English sides alike, carrying my certification statement, contact details and professional membership, which is what the receiving body is being asked to rely on.
Chinese birth certificates carry no Latin spelling, so every name has to be romanised, and the spelling I choose must match the passport rather than default pinyin. If a family has always spelled a surname Chan, Wong or Hsu, I use that and show the characters beside it so nothing looks invented. Send me the passport page, or a note of the exact spellings, along with the certificate. Where a former name (曾用名) is recorded, I translate it as a former name rather than merging it with the current one.
If you still have questions that are not covered here, feel free to reach out to me directly.