Quick summary: Vietnamese is one of the languages NAATI offers its Certified Translator test in. Two features of the language drive most of the practical issues: diacritics, which distinguish words that are otherwise identical, and name order, which places the family name first. Both create identity mismatches across a document set unless you settle your English name spelling before ordering.
Vietnamese is among the languages NAATI currently offers its Certified Translator test in, the highest translator credential under its Certification System.
The rest of this is about the two things that reliably cause trouble in Vietnamese document work, and what to do about them.
Diacritics are not decoration
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet with a system of marks that indicate both vowel quality and tone. Those marks are not accents in the ornamental sense — they distinguish different words.
Remove them and you have not produced a simplified version of the name. You have frequently produced a different word entirely, and sometimes several possible words with no way to tell which was meant.
Why this raises the bar on your scan
A faint diacritic in a small font, on a photocopied certificate, scanned in greyscale, can be genuinely unreadable — and an unreadable diacritic makes the word ambiguous rather than merely imprecise.
The Department of Home Affairs asks applicants to scan in colour, ensure the scan is legible, and save multi-page documents as one file. For Vietnamese documents, resolution matters more than for most languages. Zoom in on the names and dates in your own file before sending; if you cannot resolve the marks, neither can the translator, and they will note the ambiguity rather than guess.
How they appear in translation
Names are typically rendered with their diacritics preserved, because that is what the document says. Where your passport shows the name without them — which is common, since machine-readable passport fields strip them — the translator needs to know, so the translated document can be reconciled with your passport.
Name order
Vietnamese convention places the family name first, then a middle name, then the given name — and the given name, not the family name, is normally used to address someone.
Australian forms expect the reverse order and treat the last element as the surname.
A translator renders the name as it appears on the document rather than silently reordering it. That is correct, and it can make a translated certificate look inconsistent with an Australian form where the order was rearranged at data entry.
The fix is the same as everywhere: supply your passport spelling and order, and supply it for every person named. Your passport has already made the decision, and every other document should follow it.
Note also that a small number of family names are extremely common in Vietnam. Name alone is a weak identifier, so dates of birth and parents' names carry more of the identification work — another reason to translate civil documents completely rather than selectively.
Civil records
Vietnamese civil documents tend to be seal-heavy and, for older records, handwritten.
Every seal and stamp is translated and described, since a seal is often what makes the record official. Handwriting is rendered where legible and marked where not.
Where you hold a household or family record, send it complete and in order — including entries for people who have left the household and any struck-through lines. As with family registers generally, the evidential value lies in the history rather than the current page.
Education documents
Vietnamese education documents commonly come as a certificate plus a separate transcript, and the two are usually needed together.
The transcript carries the subject list, results and grading scale, and the grading scale is what makes the results interpretable. A translator reproduces marks on the original scale rather than converting them to an Australian equivalent — converting would be an assessment rather than a translation, and assessment belongs to the receiving body.
Institution names are rendered as they are, with the literal meaning where useful, rather than substituted with an Australian-sounding equivalent.
Dates and places
Vietnamese documents generally use Gregorian dates, which removes one complication that other language pairs bring.
Place names are a different matter. Administrative divisions have been reorganised and renamed over time, and a birth certificate may record a province, district or commune that no longer exists under that name or that has since been absorbed into another.
A translator renders the place as the document states it rather than updating it to the current name, because the document is a record of what was registered at the time. Where a place name has a well-established English form, that form is normally used; otherwise it is transliterated.
If you know that a place on your document has since been renamed or merged, that is worth mentioning in your covering material to whoever receives it — not as a correction to the translation, but as context that prevents a reader wondering why the location does not appear on a current map.
Getting the direction right
NAATI certifies by direction. To lodge documents in Australia you need Vietnamese into English, and a translator certified English into Vietnamese is not automatically certified the other way.
When you verify a practitioner number through NAATI's verification tool, check the direction you need appears among the credentials listed.
Before you order
Scan at high resolution in colour so the diacritics survive, supply your passport name spelling and order for everyone named, and send civil and education documents complete rather than selectively.
Our guides to Hindi and Spanish translation cover the equivalent issues in those languages if you are ordering across a mixed set.
NAATI publishes its practitioner identification guidance and Home Affairs its document and translation requirements; both are updated over time.