Translating Korean documents for submission to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
Are you needing to translate Korean documents for submission to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada? The most common cases would be application for a work visa, permanent residency, or other forms of immigration to Canada. The guidebook makes everything fairly clear, but once you get started with gathering the necessary documents, and seeking a translation, you may quickly become overwhelmed.
Submission of the necessary documents requires a great deal of time, but also money. There are many smaller tasks that add up quickly. By the time translation comes around, you may be tempted to go with the cheapest translator you can find. After all, if it’s only a birth certificate, marriage certificate, or diploma, what could go wrong?
In general, you will be submitting the following Korean documents with your application to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada:
기본증명서 (상세): Basic Certificate (Detailed)
혼인증명서 (상세): Certificate of Marriage (Detailed)
여권 사본: Color copy of Korean passport pages
범죄· 수사경력 회보서 (실효된 형 등 포함)' Criminal (Investigation) Records Check Reply (Including any lapsed records)
Korean birth certificates (official English name “basic certificate”), and marriage certificates contain a few tricky pieces of information. One field is in Chinese (Hanja) characters, which refers to the place of origin of the person’s last name. These documents are usually in hard copy or PDF form, so the Chinese (Hanja) characters cannot be easily searched. To make matters worse, some of places of origin don’t all exist anymore, at least not always with the exact same name. Some characters are very similar, and a novice translator may get them confused.
Some may argue that these characters are not the most important information in the certificate, and that some mistakes will be overlooked, or perhaps never even noticed.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada carefully reviews translations that it receives. Even though it makes the applicant submit their own translation, they are very much capable of reviewing the source text for accuracy. If they notice one mistranslation or overlooked area of the translation, they may reach out for correction. This would allow you to make the change, or seek out a better translator. However, your case file would return to the end of the queue, and you could be waiting at least weeks, and up to many months longer than you had anticipated.
However, some may have the time to wait, and might not see the need to seek out a qualified translator. There have been some cases where Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada rejects an application that has mistranslations, on the grounds of misrepresentation.
When you are seeking out a translation company or a private translator for translating the documents you need to submit to the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, be cautious. Make sure you ask them if they are proficient in the Chinese (Hanja) characters contained in the family origin field. Also, ensure that they are prepared to submit an affidavit with their work, attesting to the accuracy of the translation. In addition, make sure they have the preferred English spelling of names, as displayed on you or your family’s Korean passport. If your potential translation solution doesn’t seem to know what you are talking about, this may mean they haven’t performed such work before.