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Chinese–English glossary for official documents

Updated 2026-08-08

Built while writing the document guides on this site, because we could not find one. Organised by where the term appears rather than alphabetically, since that is how you actually meet them.

Free to use, quote and link. If you find an error, the contact address is in the footer — corrections are welcome and get made.

The dozen that are almost always wrong

Start here. These are the errors that change what a document says, rather than merely how it reads.

Household register (户口本)

Civil status

Notarial and legal

Police and criminal record

Education

Banking and finance

Tax

Property

Corporate

Seals, signatures and form furniture

The vocabulary for describing what is stamped or written on a document, rather than what it says.

Recommended forms for describing them in a translation:

[Round red seal: Public Security Bureau of Chaoyang District, Beijing,
 Household Registration Special Seal]
[Blind embossed seal: XX University]
[Straddle seal across the binding]
[Signature]
[QR code]
[Photograph affixed]
[Handwritten: 2019-03-05, corrected from 2019-03-06]

Signatures are rendered as [Signature] and never transcribed as a guessed name — a name a verifier cannot match is worse than an honest acknowledgement that the mark is a signature.

Conventions worth fixing once

Dates. Write 5 March 2019. Not 03/05/2019, which means two different days on two sides of the Atlantic.

Currency. Write RMB or CNY, not ¥, which is also the yen. Never convert — the receiving institution applies its own rate on its own date.

Numbers. Transcribe character for character, decimals included. Do not regroup, do not round, do not tidy formatting.

Identity numbers. Eighteen characters; the final one may be an uppercase X, and it is part of the number.

Names. One romanisation per person across the whole file, taken from the passport. See name romanisation and consistency.

Terminology. One English rendering per Chinese term, throughout a document and throughout a package. A term translated three ways looks like three different things.

FAQ

Can I use this glossary in my own work?

Yes. Use it, quote it, link to it. Attribution is appreciated and not required.

Are these translations official?

No. There is no official Chinese–English glossary for these documents. These are the renderings that are established in practice and that make the underlying distinction visible in English, which is what a receiving institution needs.

Why organise by document type rather than alphabetically?

Because that is how you meet the terms. You are holding one document and working down it, not looking up a word you already know.

What if a term is not here?

Translate the function rather than the characters, and be consistent. If a field has no English equivalent — 籍贯 is the standard example — use a descriptive term of art rather than inventing an equivalent that carries the wrong meaning.

Do these renderings guarantee acceptance?

No. Nothing guarantees acceptance. What accurate terminology does is avoid the specific category of problem where a document is refused because its translation misstated what it said.

Related guides

• Chinese names in official translations — romanisation and the consistency problemWhy the same person appears under three spellings across one family's documents, which spelling wins, and the rule that decides what to do when two documents genuinely disagree.
• Translating a Chinese hukou (户口本), field by fieldEvery field on the household register and the resident page, including the ones that are routinely mistranslated — 籍贯 is not birthplace, and 户别 decides what the document proves.
• Translating a Chinese notarial certificate (公证书)How the notarial booklet is structured, what the certificate number encodes, the standard notarial wording, and the difference between a certificate of a fact and a certificate that a copy matches the original.