Guide
Which spelling of your name goes on the translation?
Your passport says one thing, your licence another and your birth certificate a third. Here is what goes on the page, why it goes there, and the one thing a translation cannot do for you.
Published 4 September 2026 · Official Translation
The translation says what the document says
The short answer: your name on the translation is your name as the document you send us has it. Not the spelling you prefer, not the spelling on a different document, and not an average of the three. A translation follows one original, and a reader holding both should be able to match them field by field.
If the document is already in Latin letters (a Spanish licence, say, or a German birth certificate), the name is copied across exactly as printed, accents included. There is nothing to decide, and nothing we would change.
And if every document you hold is already in English or Latin script and the problem is only that they disagree with each other, a translation will not fix the disagreement. We would rather say that now than after you have paid.
In another script, the passport spelling wins
The real question arises when the document is in a script with no single English spelling: Gurmukhi, Arabic, Chinese characters, Cyrillic, Japanese. A Punjabi name can be written several ways in Latin letters and every one of them is a fair rendering. A translator left to choose would simply pick one.
We do not leave it to chance. Where a name has to be romanised, the translation follows the spelling in your passport when we have it, so the passport and the translation agree letter for letter, and so does the booking or the application that carries the same name. That is the comparison the hire desk and the visa officer both make, and the whole reason a spelling matters at all.
Order is kept as the source has it. A Japanese licence puts the family name first, so the translation does too, in the passport’s romanisation. A Mongolian name puts the father’s name before the given name: see Mongolian to English translation. Spanish and Portuguese double surnames stay in their order, neither dropped nor swapped. Our worked example of a Japanese licence at a Melbourne hire desk shows exactly this on a card bound for a rental counter.
When the document and the passport disagree
Some documents already carry a Latin-letter spelling of their own, printed by the issuing office, and it is not the passport’s. Many licences and certificates do. The translation does not overwrite it. The document’s form is kept, and the passport spelling is added beside it in square brackets as a translator’s note. Square brackets are the convention for anything a translator adds that is not on the original; it is set out in AUSIT’s recommended best practices for official and legal documents. The reader sees both spellings, and sees which one is the document’s own. A long Sinhala name that a passport shortens is kept in full: see Sinhala to English translation.
The same goes for a name that has changed. A stamp on the back of a licence recording a married or former name is translated, with its date, not skipped as clutter. The clerk is matching names, and a former name that appears on the translation explains a mismatch before anyone has to ask. It is one more reason we translate both sides of the licence.
Why we take this much care: a translation is never read on its own. The Home Affairs checklist for the onshore partner visa says “Provide original and translated documents in your application”, so the officer has both on the screen and compares them. A hire desk lays the licence, the booking and the payment card side by side. In each case somebody is looking for the name to line up, and a translation that quietly tidied it would be noticed at once. Our worked example of assembling the documents for a partner visa follows this across three languages.
What a translation cannot do
A translation cannot change your name. If your birth certificate and your passport genuinely give different names, not one name romanised two ways but two names, no translator can bring them into line, and you should be wary of one who offers to. The fix lies with the authority that issued the document, not with us.
So we will not correct a document to match another, however reasonable the request sounds. A translation that shows a name the original does not is no longer a translation of that original, and the person holding both would see it in a moment. That protects you as much as it protects us.
The other honest limit: we translate what is on the page. We do not check who you are, and the translation does not claim to. It renders the original into English, nothing more, and if you choose the NAATI option the translator’s certification statement says who did the work and in which direction. Identity is for the officer or the desk, holding your original.
What to tell us before we start
If your document is in a non-Latin script, the passport spelling is the one thing we need from you that is not on the document. Send it through the contact page with your order number, before the translation begins. Without it, the translation uses a standard romanisation, which may or may not be the one in your passport.
Photograph both sides, so a stamp or endorsement carrying a former name is there to be translated. And if you already know that a document spells your name differently from your passport, say so. It saves us a query and you a delay, and nothing is added to the price for it.
What else changes in the scripts we see most: Punjabi to English translation, Arabic to English translation and Chinese to English translation. Everything else we translate: certified translation services. A question about a name before you order: contact us.