Hello All
I need to send my english birth certificate to a french Tribunal so that I can renounce my inheritance.
The Person who answered my phone call at the Tribunal
(she was just the receptionist, she didn’t put me through to the right department so i don’t know if she was giving me the correct info)
she told me that if I send in my english birth certificate, it has to be sent in with a translation and an apostille from the Cour d’Appel.
Someone on here said I can get the UK Government Records Office to send me my birth certificate with a Multilingual Standard Form (instead of paying for a translation).
But who does the apostille? A government official in the issuing country (UK) or a government official in the receiving country (France)?
Do I even need an apostille for a birth certificate?
Help! I’m so scared of doing the wrong thing. I am admin phobic!
Thanks
An apostille is done by the country issuing the document. I could not tell you f it should be required in this case.
Thank you, I thought so.
I think the receptionist at the tribunal was confused and she confused me even more!
In general uk documents don’t need a separate apostille. You order a new certified copy of your birth certificate from the GRO in the UK. The long form, not the short form. And then get it translated by a traducteur assermenté.
The multilingual forms are generally rejected, in fact I’m not sure the GRO still do them!
If you look at p25 of attached doc you can see reference to great Britain being exempt.
Thank you for this! It confirms something I saw on the EU website saying birth certificates don’t need an apostille. But maybe Brexit has changed all that?
Regarding a translation, do I need to send the actual birth certificate to a translator who is officially approved by the french tribunal?
I think I just sent a copy to a translator “assermenté”.
Yes, in France, sworn translators (traducteurs assermentés), are considered approved translators. You can find a list of them here: https://www.cncej.org/annuaire
You can also buy a sworn translation from my website and I will send it to you in 24 hours or less:
www.trad24.com
It costs €48 with VAT for the long or full version GB birth certificate.
Best,
John Di Rico
Traducteur-Interprète expert près la Cour d’appel d’Aix-en-Provence en langue anglaise
You can rely on what jjones says.
An apostille is jusr a “notary’s seal” I’m pretty sure. It’s rarely needed. Typically for documents coming ftom lesser known countries. I used to work in a job where we had to get varioua documents submitted internationally. Only some documents need notarising ie a notary must verify/certify or whatever, and very very few will require an apostille which is a notary’s seal stuck to them by the notary as a stronger form of notary verification.
Some documents from some countries especially the more obscure ones, could be very beautiful and come up lovely with the notary’s seal, wax and string etc. attached. Notaries keep lists of which countries require what. Pricing gets very expensive for these notary services (we can be talking £,000’s for some types of document for some countries depending on the notarisation required). All according to what’s required by the country the document is coming from, what it’s for and particularly the country it’s going to. But very, very rare to need much.
I’d go by jjones advice, submit everything they ask for (personally I’d add in a copy of main page of my passport too and proof of my address whether they ask for it or not) and submit.
If you really need to get a notary to certify a document, then most UK solicitora are also Public Notaries and can do this at the most basic level. Many of them won’t charge much aa they view it as a public service and some I’ve personally used charge nothing. That’s the level I’d start at if I needed to get a document or copy certified in the UK. In the US then a lot of branches of UPS (they are like shops) have a member of staff who can notarise (ie certify documents/ your ID signing them) for a very small fee.
More specialist notary services would need an actual notaey but luckily very few things actually need this.
I’d give them the original Long Form UK birth certificate along with whatever else they require and see what happens.
Thank you KarenLot for that long answer. Excellent idea about sending proof of address as well.
I’m keen to get this done right first time.
Thank you Trad24.
I’ll be sending my documents to the Tribunal in Montpellier. Would they accept your translation even though you are approved by the Cour in Aix-en-Provence instead of Montpellier?
I am keen to give the cour exactly what they want so that they have no excuse to reject my application.
You can use any approved translator, and may want to get a couple of quotes before deciding who to use.
It can be done by any sworn translator in France, as long as they are listed on the site I mentioned previously or in one of the lists (not very user-friendly) indicated here: https://www.courdecassation.fr/experts-agrees-par-les-cours-dappel
Make sure the expert is a “translator”. If they are an expert interpreter, they can’t help you.
An apostille, if you actually need one which, from the information you have given, wouldn’t appear to be the case, is obtained from the Court of Appeal that is competent in your jurisdiction (usually your domicile or place of business) for the matter at hand. It sounds like the woman you spoke to at the local Tribunal did not understand that you were British and would be providing a British birth certificate, as Apostille documents are generally applied to French documents by the local Court of Appeal’s Apostille service, for the purpose of then using those documents in a foreign country. In other words, she seems to have got things the wrong way around. Unless of course, she was telling you that you would need the UK equivalent of the Apostille, whatever that might be.
This link explains how to get an Apostille on a document, but as @JaneJones has already pointed out, that wouldn’t seem to be the way to go here.
EDIT: for further information, there may be cases where legalisation of a foreign, publicly issued, document might be required by the Minister for Legal Affairs, but these are fairly rare.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. It is a court appointed marking of a document, and often in the form of a cover sheet attached to the document in question, provided by a specialised department of the Court of Appeal, under the October 1961 Hague Agreement.
Under column I of the table provided in the PDF document linked above, actes de l’état civil, e.g. birth certificates, are excluded from legalisation (Dispensation due to bilateral treaty) in France for documents issued by the United Kingdom authorities due to an agreement signed in 1937 (cf. Annex 3 of the PDF).
We needed UK birth certificates (and loads of others!) this year for our nationality application this year. I can confirm that apostilles weren’t required for UK certificates, although they were for a number of other countries.
If you get a new “original”, which I recommend you do as, if you have your real original, you won’t want to lose it, then make sure you get it from the General Register Office in the UK, which I imagine you have already worked out! Their stupid multilanguage think is completely useless for all purposes and a total waste of money.
We used translators at the other end of France from us and they are absolutely acceptable provided they are on the list. Their charges vary enormously so I would agree with @JaneJones suggestion that you get quotes.
Good luck! I hope it’s not urgent-urgent because, despite what the GRO says, delivery can take weeks.
Dear Trad24
Welcome to the forum and thanks for the info about where to find a list of approved translators.
As to the rest of your post, I refer you to the site T&C
If you put a very brief note in your bio that you offer translation services that would be OK.
I will remove the content in your post when I get round to it.
We recently published two articles about apostilles and document legalization.
These two formalities are typically required to have your French documents recognized by officials from another country and vice versa. Whether you need an apostille or legalization depends on the bilateral or multilateral agreements between France and the country in question.
Here are links to the articles in question:
Apostilles:
Legalization:
If anything is unclear, please let me know so I can improve the articles.
Thanks in advance,
John