Attesting Canadian Documents for the UAE

The UAE Embassy will only attest documents in either English or Arabic. If your document has been issued in French, it will first need to be translated by a qualified translator. Once the translation has been completed, the translation company will produce a sworn affidavit that the work carried out is accurate.

Check out our translations page to learn more about the different types of translations, and what they're used for.

Prior to being submitted to the Canadian Ministry of Global Affairs, most documents will need to be certified by a Notary Public. During this step in the process, the notary will either certify the translation (if applicable) or the original document as being correctly issued. For government-issued documents such as birth, marriage or death certificates, these documents do not require certification and therefore can be presented directly to the Ministry of Global Affairs.

Before documents can be presented to the UAE authorities in either Ottawa or Toronto, they need to be authenticated. During this process they will stamp the document to confirm the legitimacy of the seal or signature used to certify the document being presented. In Canada this can only be applied by the Ministry of Global Affairs.

The final step in Canada is to have the document stamped, known as attested, by the UAE Embassy in Ottawa or its Consulate in Toronto. During this stage an official UAE-government sticker and seal is applied to the document. This confirms to the authorities in the UAE that the document has completed all the required steps in Canada.

Once the document has reached the UAE, it requires a further attestation stamp by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the UAE which validates that your document has been processed correctly in the Canada. Some employers make arrangements to handle this for you, so you should check whether this needs completing by you or not.

In certain circumstances, your document may also require translation into Arabic. Again, your employer may handle this for you so best to check. If required, the whole document and its relevant stamps are translated from English into Arabic by a recognised certified translator. Once the translation has been done, then everything has been completed to make it fully useable within the UAE.

Why do I need two translations?

Whilst it would be technically possible to just translate directly into Arabic, there can be issues when doing this. Government ministries in the UAE prefer to accept a legal Arabic translation conducted in the UAE. This is to avoid misinterpretations of various Arabic spellings amongst other reasons. Because of this, we always recommend that the original translation is performed into English as this is generally cheaper than Arabic. For a document that does require Arabic translation as well, these are very fast and cheap in the UAE, and are certain to be accepted by all ministries.