Quick summary: A national identity card is a small, double-sided, number-dense document, and the two things that go wrong most often are sending only the front and letting the name on the card diverge from the name in your passport. Capture both sides in colour at high resolution, send it with your passport spelling, and expect the translator to reproduce every number exactly as printed rather than tidying it up.
The Department of Home Affairs lists a national identity card among the documents that can evidence a photograph and signature. It is a compact, high-value identity document — which is precisely what makes it fiddly to handle.
Everything on it matters, there is very little of it, and half of it is on the side people forget to scan.
Send both sides. Always.
This is the single most common failure with identity card orders.
The reverse of an identity card routinely carries:
- the issuing authority and place of issue
- the issue and expiry dates, where these are not on the front
- a residential or registered address
- parents' names, in many countries
- a machine-readable zone
- blood group, religion or ethnicity fields, depending on the country
- a second serial number distinct from the one on the front
None of that is decorative. An assessor comparing your identity card against your other documents may be looking at exactly those fields.
If the back is genuinely blank, send it anyway — it is faster than answering a question about whether it exists.
Capturing a small card
Identity cards are harder to photograph well than a full page of paper, because the detail is finer and the surface is usually laminated or polymer.
Colour and resolution
The Department asks for colour scans, and card security printing, holograms and coloured emblems carry information that greyscale destroys. Use a higher resolution than feels necessary: text on an identity card is small, and a setting that is fine for an A4 certificate can render a card number ambiguous.
Glare and framing
Polymer and laminate reflect. Tilt the light source rather than the card, or scan with the lid slightly raised. Include the full card edge to edge — do not crop to the text, because the border, the card outline and any edge printing are part of it.
Before you send
Put both sides in one file, as the Department asks for multi-page documents. Then read the numbers back yourself at full zoom. If you cannot distinguish an 8 from a B, neither can the translator.
Numbers are reproduced, not interpreted
A translator renders the card number, national identification number, serial numbers and dates exactly as they appear.
They will not reformat a date into Australian convention, drop leading zeros, insert or remove separators, or standardise a number that looks inconsistent. If the card shows a number in a particular grouping, that grouping is what appears.
This occasionally looks like carelessness and is the opposite. A national identification number is checked character by character against other records, and any silent normalisation would break that comparison.
Where a digit genuinely cannot be read, it is marked as illegible rather than guessed — which is far more useful than a confident wrong digit in a number nobody can verify from context.
Names must match your passport
Identity cards are frequently issued in a script that has several defensible English transliterations.
The rule that saves trouble: the spelling in your passport is the spelling every translation should use. Give the translator your passport name when you order, and give it for every other person named on the card.
Without that instruction, a translator produces a legitimate transliteration that may simply differ from the one on your passport — and you have created an identity discrepancy out of two correct documents. This matters most where the card and the passport are being lodged together, which is usually.
Addresses and place names
Addresses on identity cards raise their own questions. Administrative divisions do not map neatly between countries, and a district, prefecture, governorate or oblast has no exact Australian equivalent.
A translator will render the address faithfully, generally preserving the structure of the original rather than reformatting it into an Australian-style address. Where a place name has an established English form, that form is normally used; where it does not, it is transliterated.
If the address on the card differs from your current address, that is not a problem to solve in translation. It is a document showing where you lived when it was issued.
Expired cards
An expired identity card is still a document, and it still says what it says.
Whether an expired card is acceptable evidence is a question for the receiving authority, not for the translator. If you are unsure, ask before ordering — translating a card that will not be accepted is avoidable expense.
Where identity cards come up
They appear across most application types as supporting identity evidence — student visa applications, where our guide to certified translation for a student visa covers the wider document set, and family and partner matters where identity has to be established for several people at once.
They also frequently accompany civil documents. Where you are lodging a marriage certificate translation alongside identity cards for both parties, all three documents need to agree on how each name is spelled — which is an argument for ordering them together rather than separately over months.
Before you order
Scan both sides in colour at high resolution, check the numbers are readable at full zoom, and supply your passport name spelling for everyone who appears on the card.
Home Affairs publishes its document and translation requirements and NAATI its practitioner identification guidance; both are updated over time, so check the current pages if your document is unusual.