In Spain, when a foreign degree arrives, it gets homologado: the state does it and there is an administrative procedure. In the United States nothing of the sort exists. There is no ministry that declares what your Spanish degree is equivalent to.
What exists is a market of private companies that issue an equivalence report — a credential evaluation — and what the university or the employer asks you for is that report, not your degree. WES is the best known, but there are several; the serious ones all belong to the NACES association.
That change of logic has one direct consequence for our subject: the translation rules are set neither by your university nor by the destination university, but by the evaluator. And they are stricter than people expect.
Before paying for anything: is your degree official or institutional?
This check takes two minutes and decides the rest of the article.
The European Diploma Supplement is a document that accompanies your degree and describes the studies, the level and the grading system. It is governed in Spain by Royal Decree 1044/2003, and there lies the detail that matters: it can only accompany official university degrees valid throughout the national territory. Institutional degrees — títulos propios — fall outside.
If you took an institutional master's at a business school — and there are many, some very well known — you have no Supplement. It is not an oversight by your university: the rule simply does not provide for one.
| Your degree | Does it have a Diploma Supplement? | What follows |
|---|---|---|
| Official (bachelor's, official master's, doctorate) | Yes | You may save yourself the translation |
| Institutional (título propio) | No | Translation of degree and transcript |
The Supplement may save you the translation, but not always
Here is the part that does not help us and that we are telling you anyway.
WES says that for completed programmes it prefers the European Diploma Supplement in English where the institution issues one. If you have it in English, that document does the job you would otherwise pay a translation for.
The catch is in the "in English", and it comes from the Spanish decree itself: the Supplement is issued in Spanish and in another official European Union language determined by the university. It does not say English. Your university decides, and not all of them decide the same.
So the exact question to put to your registrar is not "do you issue the Supplement?" but "which second language do you issue it in?". If the answer is English, you probably do not need us for that part. If it is French or German, we are back where we started.
What evaluators reject
WES publishes its list and it is worth reading before ordering anything, because each rejection costs weeks:
- Handwritten translations.
- Translations made from photocopies.
- Translations completed by the applicant.
- Incomplete translations.
The third is the one most people skip past. It is not an assessment of your English: whoever certifies that a translation is faithful cannot be the person who stands to gain from what it says. It is the same principle behind Canada's IRCC excluding family members too, which we work through in whether a Spanish sworn translation is valid abroad.
And one that surprises for the opposite reason: WES does not translate. It does not offer that service. Anyone telling you they "handle everything" is subcontracting someone, and that someone charges.
Word for word, not adapted
WES requires the translation to be exact and word-for-word, with all the text of the original rendered into English.
This clashes with what many people think they want. The temptation is to turn a Spanish Sobresaliente into an A, or the Spanish pass mark of 5 into something an American reader grasps at a glance. That is precisely what must not be done. Converting grades is the evaluator's job, and doing it for them inside the translation hands them a pre-chewed answer, badly chewed.
A Spanish sworn translation meets this standard by construction: it reproduces what the original says, grades in their own scale included, and does not interpret.
The document they will actually ask for
For Spanish programmes the central piece is not the degree certificate: it is the Certificación Académica Personal, the full transcript with subjects, credits and grades. The degree says you finished; the transcript says what you did.
Request the transcript from your registrar before anything else, because it is the slowest part. And request the official one, not the copy from the student portal: they do not always match, and the evaluator works from the official version.
How that document gets translated, with its traps around credits and recognised coursework, is in translating your degree and transcript — written for the British case, but the mechanics of a Spanish transcript are the same.
What to ask, and who to ask
| Question | Who to ask | What it settles |
|---|---|---|
| Is my degree official or institutional? | Your university | Whether a Diploma Supplement exists |
| Which second language do you issue the Supplement in? | Your university | Whether you save the degree translation |
| Which evaluator do you require, and what documents? | The US university or employer | Everything else |
That last question is the one that governs. Each evaluator publishes its own document list, and the one that counts is the one appearing in your account when you open the file, not one you read anywhere, this page included: requirements vary by country and institution and change without notice.
Tell us which evaluator you have been asked for and what documents you hold, and we will tell you what needs translating. If your Supplement already comes in English, we will say that too.