An affidavit is a legal instrument, not a letter
An affidavit is a sworn statement made under oath before an authorised officer. Its force comes not only from what the deponent says but from the apparatus surrounding the statement: the stamp paper it is executed on, the notarial attestation, the register entry, the seal and the date.
All of that apparatus is part of the document and all of it gets translated. A translation containing only the body text — the actual declaration — is incomplete, and an authority that receives it cannot confirm the statement was properly sworn.
That means the stamp paper serial number and denomination, the notary’s name and registration details, the register or serial entry, the date of attestation and the text of the notarial endorsement itself. These are the elements an official examines to decide whether the affidavit is valid.
The one-and-the-same-person affidavit
By some distance the most common affidavit we translate is the declaration that two name variants refer to one individual. It exists because Indian records disagree with each other constantly — an initial expanded on a passport but not a school record, a surname transliterated two ways, a name changed after marriage on some documents and not others.
The affidavit’s whole purpose is to bridge that gap, which means the name variants must be reproduced with absolute precision. If the affidavit states that “Sunita Devi” and “Sunita Kumari” are the same person, the translation reproduces both exactly as written, including any spelling that looks wrong. Normalising them defeats the entire point of the document.
We take particular care here, and we will ask you to confirm the variants if the original is handwritten and any character is ambiguous.
Handwritten insertions on printed forms
Many affidavits are printed templates with blanks completed by hand: names, dates, addresses, the specific declaration. The handwriting is frequently the only part that carries the actual content, and it is frequently the hardest part to read.
Photograph these at high resolution and in good light. Where a handwritten entry is genuinely ambiguous we will ask rather than guess, because a misread digit in a date or a misread character in a name produces a document that contradicts the records it was supposed to reconcile.
Annexures
Affidavits often refer to attached documents — a copy of a passport, a certificate, a photograph — described as annexures and sometimes numbered.
If the affidavit refers to an annexure, the receiving authority expects it to be present. Send everything the affidavit references, and tell us which pages are annexures so the translation identifies them consistently with the body text.
Apostille and the order of operations
An affidavit is a privately executed document, which puts it on the longer authentication path. It generally cannot be apostilled directly: it must be notarised, then authenticated at state level, then apostilled by the Ministry.
Because the affidavit is usually being created specifically for a foreign authority, the translation frequently travels through that chain alongside it. Establish the required sequence with the receiving authority before you begin — with affidavits more than any other document, the order in which translation, notarisation and authentication happen is what determines whether the result is accepted.