Danish Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions translates Danish for US immigration files, litigation, credential evaluation and estates, and English into Danish for documents a Danish authority has to read. Certified output is signed with a Certificate of Translation Accuracy and prepared to meet USCIS requirements. The commonest single item is a personattest, the certificate drawn from Denmark’s civil registration system, and it behaves differently from a birth certificate.

Last reviewed September 12, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Language Solutions

Danes read and write English better than almost any immigrant group in the country, which shapes what we are asked to do. Nobody calls about an everyday letter. The work is the paperwork that has to be in English because a US body will accept nothing else: the civil record behind a green card petition, the judgment a family court must recognize, the degree an evaluator has to grade, the contract in a commercial dispute.

• Certified translations prepared to meet USCIS requirements
• Human linguists only, matched to the subject
• Fixed written quote within 60 minutes in business hours
• One office in New York, linguists in every state

Danish Personattest Translation and What the Certificate Omits

A personattest is an extract from the Danish civil registration system covering birth, parents, name, marital status and, where it applies, death. It is the document a Dane will be handed today when an American form asks for a birth certificate, and it is not quite the same thing. The critical difference is that it carries the name currently registered, so a marriage or a legal name change moves the certificate away from the name recorded at birth.

That single feature causes most of the Danish requests for evidence we hear about. The petition says one name, the certificate says another, and nothing on the page explains the gap. We translate the document as issued, name the issuing parish or municipality as printed, and add a translator’s note tying the registered name to the earlier one. Older documents still circulate: the combined birth and baptism certificate, the fødsels- og dåbsattest, and in Sønderjylland a dåbsattest alone.

• Personattest and birth certificate translation for I-130, I-485 and consular filings
• Marriage certificates and divorce or separation decisions from the Agency of Family Law

Danish Letters and the CPR Number on a Certified Translation

Three letters break American systems: æ, ø and å. US forms flatten them to ae, oe and aa, so Jørgensen becomes Jorgensen and one person now has two spellings in one file. We follow the passport in the English text and reproduce the Danish form as printed wherever it appears, with the relationship spelled out in a note. No spelling is picked and applied retroactively across a family’s documents.

The ten-digit CPR number, six digits of date of birth followed by four more, appears on almost every Danish record and stays exactly as it is. It is not translated, not reformatted into American date order and not partially redacted, because it is the string a reviewing officer uses to match one document to the next.

Apostille on a Danish Document Is Usually Digital

Denmark came to the Apostille Convention late, on 29 December 2006, and its practice is now built around digital delivery. The Legalisation Office of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Copenhagen is the authority. A document received through Digital Post can be forwarded to the office directly, a document carrying a certified digital signature can be uploaded and an e-apostille comes back in the browser; wet-signed paper still goes in by post.

For the translation this matters in one practical way. An e-apostilled document is a PDF with a signature block rather than a stamped sheet, and everything in that block is text we translate with the record. Send the apostilled version rather than the clean one. More on apostille translation.

Danish Degree and Transcript Translation for Evaluators

Danish degrees reach us on the way to a credential evaluator or a licensing board. Most universities issue a diploma supplement in English already, which we will tell you about rather than translate a second time. What still needs work is the older Danish-language eksamensbevis and a transcript from a professional college.

Grades are the part to leave alone. Denmark uses a seven-point scale running from 12 down through 10, 7, 4, 02, 00 and -3, which looks like nothing an American registrar has seen. We print the mark, explain the scale in a note and let the evaluator convert it. See diploma translation and academic transcript translation.

English to Danish Document Translation for Danish Authorities

Traffic runs the other way more often in Danish than in most languages on this site. A US court order, an adoption file, an affidavit, a county marriage certificate or a set of company records has to reach a Danish authority, a bank or the Danish Business Authority, and English will not do. We translate into Danish, keep American institution names untranslated with a gloss, and describe rather than convert US legal terms with no Danish equivalent.

Danish Interpreters for Depositions, Hospitals and Interviews

Danish interpreting is a narrow trade with two clear poles. One is commercial litigation: a Danish executive deposed in a patent, shipping or product case, where the attorney books an interpreter precisely because the witness speaks good English and a second-language transcript is a gift to the other side. The other is an elderly Danish immigrant in a US hospital who has lost sixty years of English to dementia and is answering in the language of childhood.

Danish Translation Cost and Turnaround

A personattest or a marriage certificate is a single page, quoted from around $24.95 per page as a US market guide and usually delivered the next business day. Judgments, company filings and transcripts run per source word from roughly $0.10 and take two to five business days. English into Danish is quoted per project. See the pricing page, or rush translation for urgent files.

Questions we get asked