However official and legal your documents may be, to have them translated while retaining the same status abroad requires some additional actions. Depending on the agreements with the other country, the documents will first need to be subject to an apostille or legalisation before becoming legally valid there. Translation Agency™ is happy to assist you in obtaining all the necessary stamps and signatures.

What is legalisation?

With the legalisation of a document, it is determined whether it was issued by an authorised person working at a competent organisation, and whether the signature on the document is actually that of a respective signatory. For example, before a Dutch document is recognised by another country, it must often go through several steps in which a higher authority is always legalising the authenticity of the signatory of the lower authority.

This ‘legalisation chain,’ as it is called, unfortunately does not have a fixed route. It may start at different points. For example, if you want to use Dutch diplomas, transcripts, and reports from educational institutions recognised by the Ministry of Education abroad, the legalisation chain begins at the Education Executive Agency (DUO).

The route may also begin at the court where signatures of notaries, translators, and officials of the civil registry and the Chamber of Commerce can be legalised.

Later in the process, the Consular Service Centre of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs plays a part, and it may also be necessary that the document is sent to the embassy or consulate of the relevant country for further legalisation. As if that was not enough, the countries for which the document is intended may also set various other legalisation requirements.

And that only refers to Dutch documents which need to make their way abroad. If you need foreign documents in the Netherlands, you will have to deal with different legalisation chains per country and per document. Needless to say, this can cause quite a headache.

Help with legalisation

If legalising documents is a part of your daily work, then you know how to get through this, even if it may not be your favourite activity. After all, who is a fan of bureaucratic procedures? For those who are unfamiliar with legalisation procedures, it is anything but fun. All that extra work in an already full schedule. And before you can even get to the bureaucratic actions, you have to find out what route to follow and what you need for that. A little help is definitely not a luxury.

As a translation agency, we received so many questions about the legalisation of documents that we decided to set up a separate legalisation service. This way, we relieve you of all the worries and annoyances associated with legalising documents.

Save yourself a lot of time and annoyance; let Translation Agency™ guide you through the entire process from translation to legalisation.

Fortunately, more and more countries are signing the Apostille Treaty, which reduces legalisation to a single court operation. We can even take this work off your hands. However, until such time that all countries have signed the Apostille Treaty, we are happy to help you with any kind of legalisation procedure, however difficult they may be.