FAQ
Official/certified translations are provided by translators with language qualification according to the requirements of the Consular Department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for translations from Bulgarian into a foreign language or from a foreign language into Bulgarian.
An official translation is a translation of a document on a letterhead of a translation agency bearing the signature of the translator and the seal of the agency.
A certified translation is an official translation certified by a competent authority. Usually, for a translation to be certified the document it relates to should also be certified (see What is certification of a document? below).
The certification of Bulgarian to a foreign language translation is performed by the Consular Department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that of a foreign language to Bulgarian translation is performed by a Bulgarian notary public.
The purpose of the certification of documents is to prove their legitimacy. It may be single certification or a series of certifications by different government authorities. For example, a conviction status certificate, a notarized declaration or a notarized power of attorney are certified by an apostille (see What is an apostille? below) by the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice (single certification) but a professional qualification certificate issued by an authorized company needs a true copy notarization and then an apostille from the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice (a series of certifications). The certification of a birth certificate or other document from the municipal administration which needs certification by the municipality that has issued it, the so-called seal needed for abroad, and then an apostille from the administration of the region where the municipality is located refers to last example as well.
When a document is intended for a country Bulgaria has a valid legal aid agreement with, such as Austria, France, Hungary, the Russian Federation, etc., no apostille certificate is required,
An apostille is a certificate on an original document, a duplicate of a document or a notarized copy of a document in implementation of the Hague Convention of 5 Oct. 1961 which applies to documents prepared in a Contracting State and intended for use in another Contracting State.
https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/specialised-sections/apostille
In Bulgaria an apostille certificate is issued by the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Consular Department, the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice, the Bulgarian National Center for Information and Documentation and the Bulgarian regional administrations.
Documents related to trade or customs operations, corporate and personal correspondence, certificates issued based on a form by an institution in the EU (A1, S1, C2, etc.) cannot be certified.
The translation cost is determined according to the type of document, the specialized terminology it contains and the language from and into which it should be translated. The translation cost of Group 1 documents (see Document groups below) is 1 translated page. The translation cost of the other group documents is determined by the translated text amount calculated with the Word Count function based on 1 standard typewritten page of 1,800 characters with spaces according to the Bulgarian State Standard. The number of characters in the translated document and not in the source document is taken into account. For example, if the translation of a power of attorney amounts to 3,600 characters, this means 2 pages.
The documents most often translated are divided by complexity into 4 main groups. The group 1 cost is the lowest and the group 4 cost is the highest.
The document groups are:
Group 1: Birth or marriage certificates, education completion diplomas, conviction status certificates, declarations from individuals, etc.;
Group 2: Annexes to diplomas, academic transcripts, certificates, powers of attorney, corporate documents (agreements, policies, procedures, instructions, powers of attorney, declarations, financial statements, company incorporation documents, company extracts or certificates from commercial registers, etc.);
Group 3: Medical documents (medical certificates, discharge summaries, tests and scans), technical documentation with less specialized text;
Group 4: Documents with highly specialized content in different areas – economics, technical area, engineering, chemistry, etc.
The languages used by our translators are also divided into groups and here the respective group determines the translation cost too.
The language groups are:
Group 1: English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, French;
Group 2: Greek, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Turkish, Croatian, Czech, Ukrainian;
Group 3: Albanian, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, Slovenian, Hungarian, Finnish;
Group 4: Chinese, Japanese.
The certification cost is the sum of the state fees for certification of the respective document and our fee for the agency service.
The implementation timelimit is determined by the service, translation only, certification only or both, and takes into account the translation amount and the certification timelimits of the competent institution.
Yes, they are document-specific. Therefore, if you are about to have a document certified for abroad or for Bulgaria we recommend that you contact us. We will give you free information and instructions on what you need to do or what preliminary certifications you need to procure for the certification process to be completed in a short time and without undue concerns on your part. You can get a quote whether your document needs any additional certifications and about the timelimit and approximate cost of the service you want, translation only, certification only or both.