Quick summary: Yes, and it is the normal way certified translation works. You do not post your birth certificate to a translator. Home Affairs itself asks applicants to scan the original document in colour and lodge that scan alongside the English translation. The constraint is legibility rather than the medium — a translator cannot certify a rendering of text they had to guess at.
"Do you need the original?" is one of the first questions people ask, usually while imagining posting an irreplaceable document to a stranger.
You do not. Certified translation in Australia is built around images of documents, and the government process it feeds into is built the same way.
What matters is the quality of the image, and there the requirements are more specific than most people expect.
Yes — and the process assumes it
The Department of Home Affairs' evidence requirements tell applicants to scan the original document and attach it to the application. For a document that is not in English, you provide two things:
- the original document
- the English translation
Both are lodged as files. Nobody is posting paper to the Department, and there is no expectation that the translator handled the physical document either.
What Home Affairs asks of the scan
Three specific requirements, and each one catches people.
Colour
Scan the original document in colour. Not greyscale, not black and white.
This is easy to get wrong because office scanners often default to monochrome, and because a black-and-white scan of a black-and-white document looks fine. But seals, stamps, security printing and ink colour all carry information, and colour is what is asked for.
Legible
The scan should be legible and meet the Department's document requirements.
Legible is doing real work here. It is the same standard the translator needs, for the same reason: text that cannot be read cannot be relied upon.
One file for multi-page documents
If the document is more than one page, save it all as one file.
A four-page document sent as four separate images is a common cause of avoidable back-and-forth, both with translators and at lodgement.
Why the original still travels with the translation
A certified translation is never submitted on its own. It goes with a copy of the source document, and the translator's marks connect the two.
For documents going to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for legalisation, this is stated precisely: an original or a copy of the original document, signed or stamped by the translator, needs to accompany the translated document — and the required details must appear on every page.
NAATI recommends translators adopt that as standard practice for any translation work, not only for DFAT jobs. So the copy you send becomes part of the finished product, which is another reason its quality matters.
When an image is not good enough
A translator will come back to you when the image leaves any part of the document uncertain. Common causes:
- A photograph taken at an angle, so text near the edges distorts
- Shadow across the page, usually from the phone or the person holding it
- Cropped edges, cutting off a stamp, a serial number or a footer
- Glare on laminated or glossy documents
- Low resolution, where small print and diacritics blur
- Greyscale, which flattens coloured seals into unreadable smudges
- A photo of a screen showing the document, rather than the document
None of these are pedantry. A certified translation carries the translator's name and practitioner number, and they are certifying that the translation corresponds to the source. Guessing at an illegible date is not something a certifying translator can do.
Photographing a document properly
A scanner is better. If you only have a phone:
- Flat surface, good light. Daylight near a window, not directly overhead.
- Phone parallel to the page, directly above the centre — not tilted.
- Fill the frame with the document, but keep all four edges inside it.
- Check for shadow from your own hands and head before you shoot.
- Use your phone's document scan mode if it has one — it corrects perspective and outputs a clean multi-page PDF.
- Zoom in and read it back at full size before sending. If you cannot read a line, neither can the translator.
- Send one file for a multi-page document.
One place scans are expressly not accepted
Worth flagging because it sounds contradictory and is not.
DFAT accepts a limited range of official Australian public documents in electronic form for legalisation, and it says plainly that scanned copies are not electronic documents for its purposes and cannot be accepted.
That rule is about the status of an official Australian document being presented for legalisation — whether it is a genuine electronic original rather than a scan of a paper one. It is not a statement about translating from scans, and it does not affect ordinary certified translation work.
If you are having something legalised, ask DFAT what form it needs. If you are having something translated for a lodgement in Australia, a good scan is what the process expects.
Before you send
Scan in colour, check every line is readable at full zoom, keep multi-page documents as one file, and do not crop anything out — including the parts you assume are irrelevant.
If you are ordering a police clearance translation or any other document translation, the quality of the file you upload is the single biggest thing within your control, and it determines whether the job runs straight through or comes back with questions.
Home Affairs publishes its scan and translation requirements and updates them, and NAATI publishes DFAT's requirements for translators — check both if your situation is unusual. You can upload a document and get a fixed-price quote through LodgeHQ Translate, which will tell you quickly if the image is not good enough to work from.