In the United States, translations of official documents are accompanied by the following affidavit:

"I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is a true and correct translation into [target language] from [source language], and that I am competent to translate the same."

The translator's signature on the affidavit may sometimes have to be notarized.

In light of the serious liability implied by this affidavit, and considering the litigious nature of US society, a translator is best advised to exercise more than the usual degree of scrupulousness with documents of birth, death, marriage, divorce, etc. Such documents are often submitted to civil authorities to obtain certain benefits, such as immigration status adjustment, social security, etc. Any hint of impropriety in the translation can impugn the translator’s integrity or competency.

With that in mind, I usually copy dates exactly as written, merely substituting Arabic numerals for Hindi numerals (my situation here is the reverse of yours, as I translate Arabic birth certificates into English).

If the date is all numeric, I keep it numeric. If the month is spelled out, I spell it out in the translation. If the whole date is spelled out, I spell out the whole shebang. If slashes (or dashes or spaces) are used to separate fields, I use the same symbol in the translation.

I only make two exceptions:

Exception 1: If the date is Hijri, and the client makes it known to me that the translation would be entirely futile without a date conversion, I would add a Gregorian equivalent in brackets next to the Hijri date.

Exception 2: A special problem arises if the date is all numeric and the day field is 12 or less, as in 5/6/2000. In most of God’s creation, this is taken to mean the fifth of June. In the US, however, this would be interpreted as the sixth of May. For that reason, I stick my neck out and spell out the month, putting it in brackets.

These are the only exceptions I make. These are exceptions that I can defend if questioned.

I don’t know if my situation is relevant to yours, as there are obvious differences, both in terms of the legal ramifications and in terms of the language direction. If you translate for clients in various Arab countries, you may have to confront other questions, such as whether to keep Arabic numerals or switch to Hindi numerals, and whether to translate August as AUGHUSTUS (for Saudi Arabia), GHUSHT (for Morocco), or AB (for Syria).

Fuad