Months spent preparing a nationality file, and the Spanish Civil Registry freezes it over a single letter. The passport reads Yevgeniy; the translated birth certificate, Evgueni. Same person, same Russian name, same life — but to the administration they are two identities that don't add up. This clash between spellings is one of the quiet causes of blocked files at the Civil Registry, immigration and nationality offices, and almost no one sees it coming.
Why the same person appears under different names
It isn't anyone's mistake. It's that there is no single way to render a name in the Latin alphabet. When the original is in Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek or Chinese, each authority applies its own transliteration system, and the result varies:
- Passports follow the ICAO Doc 9303 standard, which sets transliteration tables for the Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic families. The machine-readable zone accepts only A–Z, with no diacritics, so ñ becomes N, ê becomes E, and the German ü is usually mapped as UE (Müller → MUELLER).
- Birth certificates and civil records may use a different system — often an ISO standard, or simply a phonetic transcription from the era in which the document was issued.
The result: the airport knows you as Mohammed, the embassy registered you as Mohamed, and your diploma says Muhammad. All three are defensible transliterations of the same Arabic name.
The most common sources of divergence:
- Diacritics and special characters: accents, cedillas, the German ß, the Nordic vowels (Ø, Å) that get doubled in a passport.
- Order of surnames: in Chinese names the family name comes first (Zhang Wei), but a Western official may reverse it and register "Wei Zhang".
- Russian patronymics and matronymics: the otchestvo (Ivanovich, Petrovna) is sometimes recorded as a middle name and sometimes omitted, depending on the document.
- Compound names: a "Jean-Pierre" that appears hyphenated on one paper and split on another, or a middle name that shows up in some records and not others.
What a sworn translator can — and cannot — do
Here lies the most common misunderstanding. The client asks the translator to "put the name right", meaning: match the passport. And the sworn translator cannot do that.
The reason is the core of their function. Under Spain's Royal Decree 724/2020, which governs the Office for Language Interpretation, the sworn translator certifies with signature and seal the fidelity and accuracy of the translation against the original. Fidelity means reproducing what the document says, letter by letter. If the Russian certificate reads Evgueni, the translation reads Evgueni. "Correcting" the name to fit the passport would not be translating — it would be falsifying the document.
What the translator can do, and it is the tool that resolves the vast majority of these cases, is add a translator's note (T.N.). It is a clarification, in brackets and clearly identified as the translator's addition, that leaves the body of the document untouched but informs whoever reads it. For example:
Evgueni Petrov [T.N.: in the holder's passport, no. XXXX, this name is transliterated as "Yevgeniy Petrov" under the ICAO system. Both spellings correspond to the same person.]
The note corrects nothing. It explains that two different spellings are one and the same identity, giving the official the grounds not to block the file. That is exactly the line: the translator clarifies the equivalence, they do not amend the fact.
Who actually corrects it
If what you need is to change the name on the document itself — because there is a genuine error, not a mere transliteration variant — only the issuing authority can do that: the civil registry of the country of origin, the consulate, or whatever body issued the paper. The translator has no power to correct the substance, just as they cannot invent a missing apostille. Each stays in their lane.
This problem is a close cousin of others we've covered: an inconsistent name is one of the mistakes that get a sworn translation rejected, and it turns up often among the documents you need to translate for Spanish nationality, where the birth certificate and the passport must identify the same person beyond doubt.
Practical advice
- Provide the passport as a reference when ordering the translation. It carries the "official" spelling the Spanish administration uses, and it lets the translator draft an accurate note.
- Flag the divergences you already know about: if your name appears in three forms, say so before work starts. It saves round trips.
- Expressly ask for the translator's note when there is a discrepancy. It isn't added automatically — the translator includes it if they know the mismatch exists.
- Keep consistency across every document in the same file. If you intend to request a correction from the issuing authority, do it before translating, not after.
At Textualia we check the names in every file before finalising the translation. When we spot that your passport and your birth certificate don't match, we tell you and, where appropriate, include the translator's note certifying that we are talking about a single person. Translating faithfully is not at odds with anticipating the problem — that is precisely why the figure of the sworn translator exists.