The short answer
Certified means a translator or agency has signed a statement that the translation is accurate, with their name and contact details attached.
Notarised means a notary watched someone sign that statement and recorded it. The notary is confirming who signed — not that the translation is any good.
Apostilled means the Ministry of External Affairs has certified that an Indian document is genuine, for use in another Hague Convention country.
They stack rather than compete. You can have a certified translation that is not notarised. You can have a notarised translation of a document that is not apostilled. What you need depends entirely on who is receiving it.
How to find out which applies to you
Go back to whoever asked and read their exact words. This sounds obvious and it is the step people skip.
If they said “certified translation” and nothing else, a certified translation is almost certainly what they want. Most universities and most employers mean exactly this.
If they said “notarised”, get it notarised — but ask whether they also need the original apostilled, because notarisation is frequently one step in a longer chain rather than the destination.
If they said “attested”, stop and ask what they mean. This word is used for at least three different processes in Indian usage and it is the single most ambiguous term in this field.
If they said “apostille”, check whether the destination country is a Hague Convention member. If it is not — and several common destinations for Indian workers are not — then apostille is not available and you need embassy attestation instead, which is a different and longer process.
What the order should be
The most expensive mistake in this field is doing the right steps in the wrong sequence.
In the usual case, the original Indian document is authenticated, and the translation accompanies it. The Ministry apostilles your birth certificate; your certified translation travels alongside.
Some authorities instead want the translation itself authenticated. Because a translation is a privately issued document, that requires notarisation first, then state-level authentication, then apostille — three steps, each dependent on the last.
A few want everything translated after apostille, so that the apostille certificate itself appears in the translation.
These are genuinely different sequences producing genuinely different document sets. We will not guess between them, because a wrong guess costs weeks rather than rupees. Get the requirement in writing from the receiving authority and send it to us.
What none of this does
None of these processes checks whether your translation is good. A notary does not read the source language. An apostille says nothing about the translation at all — it authenticates the Indian original.
The accuracy of the translation rests entirely on who translated it and whether they took care. That is worth remembering when choosing on price alone: the certification apparatus around a bad translation does not improve it, it just makes the bad translation official.