Passport Translation in Georgia

When does a Georgian passport need translating at all?

The data page of a Georgian biometric passport is printed in Georgian and English, and the machine-readable zone follows the ICAO standard. For that reason, English-speaking institutions in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada or Australia rarely ask for a translation of the passport itself. What they do ask for is a translation of the pages that are not bilingual: visa stamps, entry and exit stamps, residence stickers, handwritten border annotations and, in older passports, the notes page.

A translation of the whole passport becomes necessary when the destination country does not work in English. Russian is required for many procedures in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan and other Russian-speaking administrations; Turkish for residence permits, marriage and property purchases in Turkey; German, Italian, Spanish, Greek or Polish for civil registries, notaries and local municipalities in those countries; Arabic for employment and residency files in the Gulf. In each case the translation is normally bound to a notarized copy of the passport and, for many countries, the notarial certification is apostilled.

Old-style Georgian passports issued before the biometric series, and travel documents such as the neutral travel document or the passport of a stateless person, contain more Georgian-only text and are translated in full. If you are unsure whether your passport series is bilingual, send us a photo of the data page and we will tell you.

Foreign passports translated into Georgian

The larger part of our passport work runs in the opposite direction. Foreign nationals who live, work, marry, buy property or open a company in Georgia are asked again and again for a notarized Georgian translation of their passport. The Public Service Development Agency requires it for marriage registration and for residence permit applications, the National Agency of Public Registry requires it when a foreigner becomes a company director, shareholder or property owner, Georgian notaries require it for any power of attorney, sale contract or declaration signed by a foreigner, and banks require it when opening personal or corporate accounts.

We translate passports from every widely used script: Latin-alphabet passports from the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States, Turkey and Latin America; Cyrillic passports from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other CIS states; Arabic-script passports from the Gulf, Iran, Egypt and North Africa; passports from China, India, Israel, Japan and South Korea. For passports with non-Latin scripts, the Georgian rendering of the name follows the Latin spelling printed in the machine-readable zone, which is the spelling Georgian authorities enter into their databases.

A foreign passport translation for Georgia normally covers the data page, any page with a valid Georgian visa or residence stamp, and pages with notes that affect the holder's status. Notaries and banks are usually satisfied with the data page alone; PSDA and the Public Registry sometimes ask for every used page. We ask where the translation is going and translate the pages that office actually needs, so you are not paying for twenty blank pages.

Name transliteration: the detail that causes the most rejections

A single letter of difference between the name in a passport and the name in a birth certificate, diploma or bank statement can hold up a residence permit, a marriage registration or an inheritance case for weeks. Georgian names have several defensible Latin spellings (Giorgi and George, Ketevan and Ketevani, Mchedlishvili and Mtchedlishvili), Cyrillic names are transliterated differently by Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh authorities, and Arabic names may appear in three or four versions across a single family's documents.

Our rule is simple: the passport wins. Every translation we produce follows the spelling in the passport of the person concerned, and where a client has an older document with a different spelling, we add a translator's note explaining the correspondence rather than silently changing anything. For families, we build a small spelling list at the start of the project so that the father's surname appears identically in his passport translation, the children's birth certificates and the marriage certificate.

When the direction is into Georgian, we apply the transliteration conventions used by Georgian civil registration, so that the Georgian form of a foreign name matches what PSDA will print on a Georgian marriage certificate or residence card. This spares clients the situation where a bank has one Georgian spelling of their name and the registry another.

Format: notarized copy, translation and binding

A passport is never stapled to a translation. The notary first prepares a certified copy of the required pages from the original, and the translation is bound to that copy together with the notarial certification page. For this the original passport must be shown to the notary once; the holder or a representative can bring it, and it is returned immediately. If the holder is abroad and cannot present the original, a copy certified by a notary in the holder's country and apostilled can be used instead, which we can plan with you.

The translation itself reproduces the layout of the data page field by field: type, country code, passport number, surname, given names, nationality, date and place of birth, sex, dates of issue and expiry, issuing authority and the machine-readable lines, which are transcribed exactly. Stamps and visas are translated as separate entries with the date, the border point or issuing authority and the text of the stamp. Anything illegible is marked as such.

For use abroad, the notarial certification and, where required, the apostille on it are translated too, so that the foreign officer can read every page in the bundle. For use in Georgia, the certification is in Georgian already and needs no further step.

Turnaround, pricing logic and typical scenarios

A single passport data page in a common language is one of the quickest official documents to process. When the original is in Tbilisi and the request arrives in the morning, a notarized translation is usually ready the same working day. Full passports with many stamps, rare languages, and orders that require an apostille on the notarial copy take longer. The price is based on the number of translated pages and the notarial fee, not on the number of blank pages, so a data page with two visas costs far less than a fully used passport.

The scenarios we see most often are: a foreign spouse preparing for marriage registration at the House of Justice; an investor buying an apartment in Tbilisi or Batumi through a Georgian notary; a founder registering an LLC at the Public Registry; a Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian resident applying for a residence permit or a bank account; a Georgian citizen preparing a file for a Turkish residence permit or a German family reunification visa; and parents whose child has a different surname and who need matching translations for a school abroad. Each of these has a known set of pages and a known format, and we prepare the package accordingly.

If your file also includes a birth certificate, marriage certificate, diploma or criminal record certificate, send everything together. The names are then checked across all documents at once, and the notary can process the whole set in one visit.

What to send for a passport translation

A sharp photo of the data page with all four corners visible is enough for a quote. If stamps or visas must be translated, photograph each page separately in good light. Tell us which office will receive the translation so we translate the right pages, and tell us whether you can bring the original to the notary in Tbilisi.

If you have any earlier Georgian or foreign translations of your documents, or a residence card, send them as well so the spelling of your name stays consistent.