If you are translating a bank statement, do you need an official translation? It doesn’t really matter if you are an expat coming to live in Spain or even just a Brit who is doing the necessary paperwork you need in order to stay in Spain after Brexit, one thing you will probably need to do is to translate a copy of your bank statement.
One thing I hear a lot from clients here at CBlingua in Malaga that come seeking a sworn translation from English into Spanish is that they don’t understand why, when a document is written in a widely spoken language like English, it is necessary to translate it into Spanish. Well, the official reason, in Spain, when you need to produce a document to the authorities for official reasons, said document must either be written in Spanish, an official language of the region of Spain you may happen to find yourself in (Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia) or it must have been translated by a Certified Translator (known in Spanish as a “traductor jurado”, a sworn translator).
This requirement is often demanded irrespective of the type of document you may need translated, which may surprise you, considering bank statements are almost always filled with numbers and little else. You may think that, as the only reason they are asking you to produce this document is to know how much funds you have at your disposal, there should be no reason to translate it, well, unfortunately the previous requirement still applies and you’ll have to look for a that will be able to give you the sworn translation you need.
Finding a Translation Agency in Malaga itself can be a difficult hurdle to jump, as most public officials have no idea of were you could get one (most haven’t had to go through this process themselves) and they can’t really recommend one. So, I guess you’ll just have to open your favorite search engine or ask a friend to find one. However, given the fact that you are reading this on the CBlingua Translation Agency website, I’m guessing that you have at least passed this hurdle and are hopefully on your way to solving your problems 😉
Finally, one interesting request we get a lot when translating this type of document is that we also convert the currency used in the bank statement into euros. If you have had to have documents like this translated by a Spanish sworn translator before, you may have found sworn translators that are unwilling to convert the funds that appear on the bank statement into euros. This is because, as a sworn translation is a legal document, the translator would be liable if the conversion were not correct and, therefore, the entire translation was useless. You may not realize this from the translation, but most sworn translators are not also experts on exchange rates. Here at CBlingua though we like to try an avoid this issue when possible by putting a small translator’s note citing the current exchange rate, thus making everyone happy. Even so, most times, if the footnote is there or not, there should be no problem presenting the translation. Spanish officials may not always speak English, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to use a convertor.
I hope you have found this article interesting and maybe it has helped you to better understand what is needed when translating these types of documents. Here at CBlingua Malaga we like to keep people informed and that’s why we publish articles regularly on different translation and sworn translation related topics. Keep browsing this website or any of our other websites to know more.