Client details have been reduced to a first name. No surname, contact details, institution name, grades, marks or document numbers appear anywhere in this account, and no figures have been quoted for the receiving university beyond what it publishes itself.

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Most enquiries that reach our desk ask us what to do. This one did something rarer and considerably more useful: it quoted a sentence from our own website back at us and asked us to confirm, in writing, that the sentence meant what the writer hoped it meant.

An enquiry from Jessica reached us in October 2026. She had a Norwegian degree certificate and the supporting educational paperwork that goes with it, she had an application running for admission to RMIT University Vietnam, and she had read on our site that we offer certified translation with UK notary public verification. Her question was whether that service — that exact phrase — would produce what her application needed. She also asked whether the price covered every page of the document, which turned out to be the sharpest question in the message.

What follows is the whole of it: what she asked, what the enquiry record actually contained, where the real difficulty sat, and what we sent back.

What actually landed in the enquiry form

The record is short. United Kingdom. Service required: notarisation and legalisation. Source language Norwegian, target English. Two pages. Notarisation: yes. Certification: unsure. Document type: degree certificate. Purpose: study abroad. Two files attached, both .jpeg, both plainly photographs taken on a phone. She had reached us through the hire a translator quotation form, having arrived earlier on our notarised translation services page.

Read quickly, that is a simple job: two pages, Norwegian to English, add a notary. Read properly, there are four separate problems sitting inside it, and three of them would have surfaced only after the money had changed hands.

Why this was harder than the website sentence made it sound

"Notarisation: true. Certification: unsure."

That pairing is the single most informative thing in the whole enquiry, and it is extremely common. Someone has told Jessica, or she has read somewhere, that the documents must be notarised. Nobody has told her what certification is, so she honestly ticked "unsure" rather than guessing. She was right not to guess, because the two words describe two different acts performed by two different people, and buying one when you needed both is the standard way these applications come unstuck.

A certified translation is produced by the translator. It is a complete rendering of the source document into English, accompanied by a signed statement — a certificate of accuracy — in which the translator confirms that the translation is a true and complete version of the document in front of them, and gives their name, their credentials and the date. The accuracy claim belongs to the translator, and so does the liability for it.

A notarised translation adds a second, separate layer on top. A notary public in England and Wales is a qualified lawyer, appointed by the Court of Faculties and regulated by the Master of the Faculties, whose work is mainly concerned with documents destined for use overseas. What a notarial certificate attests to is the signature: the notary confirms who signed, that they are who they say they are, and that they had the authority and capacity to sign. That is what the notarial act does.

What it does not do — and this is the part that deserves to be said plainly, because a great deal of marketing copy across our industry leaves it comfortably vague — is verify that the translation is correct. A UK notary will not generally read Norwegian, will not check whether a module title has been rendered sensibly, and does not purport to. The accuracy assurance comes from the translator’s certificate. The notary’s certificate confirms the identity and signature of the person who gave that assurance. Stacked together, they tell the receiving institution: here is a complete English translation, here is the named professional who stands behind it, and here is an independent officer of the law confirming that this is genuinely that person’s signature.

So Jessica needed both. The notarisation she had been told about is not an alternative to certification; it sits on top of it and is meaningless without it. When we replied, that was the first thing we set out, and the "unsure" in her form became a "yes, and here is why".

The receiving institution is in Vietnam, and it writes its own rules

This is where honesty costs a little and earns a lot. We can tell an applicant with real confidence what the UK Home Office expects, because we deal with it constantly. A private international university in Vietnam is a different proposition. It is not a government body operating under a published statutory rule we can cite; it is an admissions office, and admissions offices set their own documentary standards.

What we could do was read what the university itself publishes. RMIT University Vietnam’s own published application guidance asks applicants for certified copies of official academic transcripts and results, and asks that they be provided in both the original language and English. That is a clear, checkable requirement and it maps neatly onto a certified translation presented alongside the source document.

What that same published guidance does not do is specify UK notarisation, or name who must certify the copies. That silence is important and we said so. It means our service comfortably covers the stated requirement for an English version of the documents, and that the notarial layer — which Jessica had already decided she needed — is something she should confirm directly with the admissions office, because only they can tell her whether their internal standard requires it and in what form. We would supply it, and supply it properly, but we were not going to tell a client that a university she was applying to had a requirement we could not evidence.

That is the general principle behind every job of this kind, and it is worth carrying away from this story: the receiving body sets the specification. The translation company’s job is to meet that specification exactly, to explain what each component does, and to be straight about the boundary between what we know and what only the institution can confirm.

"Does the service include all pages of the document?"

Jessica asked this almost as an afterthought at the end of her message. It was the most commercially loaded question she asked, and the answer is the reason we price on content rather than on a flat per-document figure.

Norwegian higher education does not package itself into a single sheet. The vitnemål is the diploma: the document recording the completed qualification and the degree awarded. The karakterutskrift is the transcript of records: the itemised list of courses and results that sits behind the diploma. Norwegian institutions treat these as separate documents and issue them separately, and many also issue a Diploma Supplement in English as a matter of course. A diploma on its own, with the transcript left out, tells an admissions officer that a degree exists but not what it contained — which is precisely what a credential evaluation needs to see.

Even within a single one of those documents, length is not guaranteed. A transcript can run across several sides. Stamps, award statements, grading-scale explanations, registry endorsements and signature blocks are frequently printed on the reverse, and a reverse side that goes untranslated is not a minor omission — it is a defective set. A certified translation certifies completeness. If a page is missing, the certificate of accuracy attached to it is simply not true, and an institution that spots the gap is entitled to reject the whole bundle.

So the answer we gave was: yes, every page, both sides, including the parts that look like boilerplate — and that is why we confirm the page count from the actual files before we quote, rather than quoting against the number someone types into a form. Her form said two pages. Two phone photographs had been attached. Those are not the same claim, and they needed reconciling before anybody committed to a figure.

Two phone photographs, bound for a notary

Phone photographs are perfectly workable source material for a great many certified translations, and we would far rather have a clear photograph today than a promised scan next week. But a notarised set raises the bar, for a practical reason rather than a bureaucratic one.

When a notary is involved, the finished bundle is a formal instrument. It will be examined by someone whose job is to be sceptical. If the source image is skewed, if a corner of the page is cropped, if a security stamp has been flattened into an unreadable grey smear by the flash, or if a signature block is cut off at the edge of the frame, then the translator is translating around a gap and the bundle carries a visible weakness into an admissions office on the other side of the world.

There is a second, subtler issue. Where a notary is asked to certify a copy of a document as well as to witness the translator’s signature, the notary will want to see the physical original or a properly produced copy, not a photograph of unknown provenance. Which of those two services is being bought changes what the client has to provide. Establishing that distinction at the scoping stage — before an invoice exists — is the difference between a smooth job and an awkward conversation halfway through one.

How we scoped it before quoting a penny

Because this arrived as a question rather than an order, the whole first stage was conversation, and we kept it that way deliberately.

  1. We answered the question she actually asked. She had quoted our website copy and asked us to confirm it met her requirement. We confirmed what it covers, in the same words she had used, and we were explicit about the one thing it cannot do — guarantee what a university in another country will accept. Nobody can promise that, and a company that does is selling something it does not own.
  2. We separated certification from notarisation in writing. One short paragraph on what the translator’s certificate of accuracy says, one on what the notarial certificate says, and one sentence making clear that the second does not substitute for the first.
  3. We opened the files and counted. Both photographs were reviewed for legibility, orientation, cropping and completeness, and checked against the two-page figure on the form. We asked whether a transcript existed alongside the diploma, and whether either document carried printing on the reverse that the photographs had not captured.
  4. We asked her to put one question to the admissions office. Specifically: does the receiving office require notarisation, and if so, does it want the notary’s certificate on the translation, on a certified copy of the original, or on both? One email from the applicant resolves in two days what a translation company can only speculate about.
  5. We set out the apostille position before she had to ask. It is the question that always follows notarisation for overseas use, and it is better answered unprompted. More on that below.
  6. We quoted against the confirmed scope. Our certified and notarised academic work is quoted against a confirmed page count rather than an estimated one, with the notary’s own fee itemised separately so it is visible rather than buried. Turnaround for a set of this size was our standard two to three working days.

The apostille question that always follows notarisation

Whenever a UK notary is involved in a document heading overseas, the next question is whether the receiving country will want an apostille on top. For this file the position had changed very recently, which is exactly why we checked it rather than relying on what was true a year ago.

Vietnam acceded to the Hague Apostille Convention of 1961, and the Convention entered into force for Vietnam on 11 September 2026, implemented domestically by Decree No. 293/2026/ND-CP. Jessica’s enquiry reached us in October 2026 — roughly five weeks after that came into effect. The United Kingdom has been a party since January 1965, and Norway is also a party. All three jurisdictions in this story are now inside the same system, which was not the case for most of the lifetime of the advice still sitting on a lot of websites.

The practical consequences are worth stating precisely, because the detail is where people trip up.

An apostille certifies a signature, the capacity of the signatory, and the seal or stamp. It does not certify the content of the document and it does not certify the accuracy of a translation. Vietnam’s implementing decree is explicit that receiving authorities still assess substance, translation accuracy and admissibility for themselves. An apostille is a chain-of-authenticity device, not a quality mark.

Second, and this is the point that surprises people: the UK’s Legalisation Office can only apostille documents issued in the UK. It cannot put a UK apostille on a Norwegian diploma. What it can apostille is the UK notary’s certificate, because that is a UK document signed by a UK public official whose signature is held on its records. If the Norwegian source documents themselves need to carry an apostille, that apostille has to be obtained in Norway, from the competent Norwegian authority — not from London.

So the honest advice was a conditional one. If the admissions office wants only an English translation it can rely on, the certified translation with the notary’s certificate does the job. If it wants the chain carried through to government level, the notarial certificate can be apostilled here, and the Norwegian originals would need to be apostilled in Norway. Which of those applies is a question for the university, and we told her to ask it in the same email in which she asked about notarisation.

What went into the finished set

Once the scope was confirmed, the build itself was straightforward, which is usually a sign that the scoping was done properly.

The translation was handled by a Norwegian-to-English translator working in academic documentation, which matters more for a vitnemål than it might sound. Norwegian degree nomenclature, credit conventions and grading descriptors do not map one-to-one onto British equivalents, and the correct treatment is to render them faithfully rather than to helpfully convert them into something a British reader would recognise. A certified translation is not an equivalency assessment and should never pretend to be one. Where a Norwegian term has no clean English counterpart, the term is carried through with a literal rendering, so the admissions office and any credential evaluator it uses can see exactly what the original said.

Every element on every page was accounted for: the body text, the headers, the award statement, the issuing registry’s wording, the stamps, the seals and the signature blocks, each described in place rather than silently dropped. The layout of the English version mirrors the original closely enough that a reader holding both can put them side by side and track from one to the other without effort. Anything illegible in the source would have been marked as such rather than guessed at — a translator who invents a character they cannot read has broken the certificate they are about to sign.

The certified package then comprised the complete English translation of every page, the translator’s signed and dated certificate of accuracy with their credentials and professional membership details, a copy of the source documents bound in so that the translation is never separated from what it translates, and the UK notary public’s notarial certificate attesting to the translator’s signature and identity. Delivered as a PDF set for immediate upload, with hard copies available where an institution asks for wet-ink originals.

How it turned out

The set went out inside the agreed deadline. Every page of the Norwegian documentation appeared in the English version, certified as complete, with the notarial layer Jessica had asked about sitting on top of it exactly as our website said it would. Nothing in the bundle was queried, and nothing came back for correction.

Jessica confirmed that the documents went in with her application, complete and on time, and that the pack did the job she had bought it to do. The admissions decision itself belongs to the university and is theirs alone to make; our part was to make sure that when it was made, it was made on a complete file rather than a short one.

What we would single out from this job is not the translation. It is that she asked before she bought. The enquiry that reads "your website says X — does X meet my requirement, and does it include everything?" is the enquiry that never turns into a complaint, because every assumption on both sides gets tested while it is still free to test them. We would like more of them.

Questions this raises for anyone in the same position

Do I need my Norwegian transcript translated as well as my degree certificate?

Almost always, yes. The vitnemål records that a degree was awarded; the karakterutskrift records what was studied and how it was graded. An admissions office assessing whether you meet entry requirements needs the second as well as the first. Check the receiving institution’s checklist, and translate whatever it names, in full.

My Norwegian university already issued a Diploma Supplement in English. Is that enough?

Sometimes it is, and it is always worth asking before you pay for anything. Some institutions accept an officially issued English-language document from the awarding university. Others want a certified translation of the primary Norwegian documents regardless, because the supplement is a summary rather than a translation of the diploma itself. The institution’s own admissions team is the only reliable source on this.

Does a UK notary check that my translation is accurate?

No, and anyone implying otherwise is misdescribing the service. The notary confirms the signature, authority and capacity of the person signing. The accuracy assurance is the translator’s, given in the certificate of accuracy and backed by the translator’s professional liability. Both pieces matter; they just do different jobs.

Will a university abroad definitely accept a UK notarised translation?

No translation company can promise that, and you should be wary of one that does. What a reputable provider can do is produce a set that meets the specification the institution has published, explain precisely what each component attests to, and tell you where the boundary of its knowledge lies. The acceptance decision belongs to the receiving body.

Can I send photographs from my phone instead of scans?

For many certified translations, yes — a sharp, square, well-lit photograph of the whole page is usable. For a notarised set, send the best images you can and expect to be asked for more: every side of every page, nothing cropped, stamps legible. If the notary is also being asked to certify a copy of the original, photographs will not be sufficient on their own and you will need to produce the document itself.

Do I need an apostille as well?

Ask the receiving institution, because an apostille answers a question about government-level authentication that many university admissions offices simply do not ask. If one is wanted, remember which country issues which: the UK Legalisation Office can apostille a UK notary’s certificate, but a Norwegian document has to be apostilled in Norway.

Sending Norwegian qualifications to a university abroad?

If you are at the stage Jessica was at — holding a vitnemål, a karakterutskrift and an application deadline, and not entirely sure which of certification, notarisation and legalisation you actually need — ask before you order. Send us the documents and tell us who is going to receive them, and we will tell you what the set needs to contain and what each part of it does.

You can read more about the mechanics on our notarised translation services page, see how we handle degree certificates, transcripts and research documents on our academic translation services page, and compare the options if you have been told you need a sworn translation rather than a certified one. Our guide to notarised translation in the UK covers the process end to end, and we have written separately on how long a notarised document translation stays valid and on certified academic translations for students and researchers. The frequently asked questions page answers the common practical points, and when you are ready for a figure against a confirmed page count you can request a quotation for a certified translation. Prices are quoted in pounds sterling excluding VAT.