How to translate a Portuguese document to English

How to translate a Portuguese PDF to English

1. Start from a clear copy. Use the PDF the cartório or conservatória issued, or scan the paper. A straight phone photo of each page works too.
2. Upload it to LoreAI. Create a free account. Your first document is free, up to 3 pages and 3 MB.
3. Choose English. LoreAI recognizes Portuguese, Brazilian or European, without you picking it.
4. Download the Word file. The boxes of a certidão come back as Word tables, label next to value.
5. Read it against the original. Check each field label, name, date and registration number.

What LoreAI got right and wrong on a certidão de casamento

On October 31, 2026, we ran LoreAI on specimen-marriage-certificate-pt.pdf, a scanned specimen Brazilian certidão de casamento with invented names. Both files are in the example above.

Names

Kept as written, including the accent in Márcia Augusta Lima

Matrícula

The 32-digit registration number kept digit for digit

Pais

Came back as COUNTRY, twice. Pais means parents, and país with an accent means country

Regime de bens

Comunhão parcial de bens became Partial community of property

Averbações / Anotações

Became Registrations / Notes. Annotations is closer, since averbações record later changes to the entry

Dates

14 de setembro de 2019 became 14 September 2019. 03/02/1990 stayed 03/02/1990

Two rows point to checks worth doing on any certidão. Read every field label, because a missing accent in the scan can turn one word into another. And add the month in words next to any numeric date, because a US reader takes 03/02/1990 as March 2, while the Brazilian record means 3 February.

Brazilian and European Portuguese documents

The language is the same, but the offices and some spellings differ. Knowing which country issued the document helps you check the English.

• Brazilian civil records come from a cartório, the Registro Civil das Pessoas Naturais. Portuguese records come from a Conservatória do Registo Civil. Note registro in Brazil and registo in Portugal.
• Both countries write dates day first, so 03/02 is 3 February in either.
• Brazilian certificates often carry a long matrícula number at the top. Copy it exactly, because it identifies the entry.
• Records from Angola, Mozambique or Cape Verde use Portuguese too. Keep the names of their registry offices in Portuguese and translate the field labels.

A Portuguese marriage certificate for USCIS

USCIS asks for a full English translation of any foreign language document, certified by the translator as complete and accurate, with a statement that the translator is competent to translate from Portuguese into English[1]. Full means the stamps, the annotations and the notes too. A line such as Nada consta, nothing recorded, still goes into the translation.

LoreAI is not a certified translation service and does not sign anything. Its Word file is the draft. A person fluent in Portuguese and English checks it against the scan, fixes errors such as the Pais field and signs the certification. The marriage certificate translation guide walks through each field, and the USCIS translation guide covers the certification.

Free options for a typed Portuguese PDF

If your PDF has selectable text, Google Translate's document tab translates files up to 10 MB and 300 pages for free[2]. Text in scanned pages and images stays untranslated there[2]. A certidão from a cartório is usually a scan or a photo, which is where LoreAI's OCR step matters.

Questions people ask