In my 44 years as a translator in the USA, I have literally translated tens of thousands of birth certificates from dozens of countries. Brazilian birth certificates represent a large percentage of this figure, for obvious reasons.

 There are currently two types of birth certificates these days. One certificate presents the information in a form which is filled out by the Civil Registry. The other is a full-text birth certificate (certidão de inteiro teor), which provides a literal narrative of the record.

 For reasons that are not worth speculating, USCIS often rejects the filing of the Brazilian form birth certificate and requires its replacement by a full-text certificate. Therefore, my advice to Immigration Attorneys is to tell the client to request the full-text certificate from the start. One client had to translate four different versions of her birth certificate because of a contradiction found in a divorce decree.

 Carlos de Paula is one of the top Brazilian Portuguese translators in the USA since 1982. And now a top Portuguese AI Translation editor as well.