What a Request for Evidence Is
A Request for Evidence is a notice from US Citizenship and Immigration Services saying that the file, as submitted, does not yet let an officer make a decision. It is not a denial. It is a pause with a deadline attached, and the deadline is set by the notice rather than by you.
Requests of this kind are frustrating precisely because they are rarely about the substance of a case. The relationship is real, the documents are genuine, the evidence is there. What is missing is a paragraph of boilerplate, or a stamp nobody rendered into English. The case is sound and the calendar still moves.
An RFE specifies which document it concerns and what is deficient. Before acting, identify exactly which item is being questioned. Applicants sometimes re-translate an entire file in response to a notice about one certificate.
The Problems That Actually Trigger Them
No certification statement at all
The most common version. The English version arrives clean and readable with no attached attestation, usually because whoever prepared it treated the finished text as the deliverable. Without the statement, the officer has an English text of unknown provenance and no one attesting to it.
This happens most often with work prepared informally by a bilingual friend or relative, and with documents from an agency abroad certifying to a different country’s conventions.
A certification missing one of its parts
More subtle, and harder to catch. The statement exists, but it asserts accuracy without asserting completeness, or it omits the translator’s competence entirely, or it is typed but never signed, or it carries no date. The regulation asks separately for completeness, accuracy and competence; the signature and date come from the certification format USCIS publishes and from form instructions rather than from the regulation itself. Either way, a statement missing one of them is treated as an incomplete certification rather than a complete one with a small flaw.
The competence line is the one most often absent. It reads as redundant to people writing their first certification, so it gets dropped.
A partial translation
Thai civil documents are dense with material that is easy to treat as decoration: registrar seals, office stamps, revenue stamps, handwritten marginal notes, and signatures. An English version covering only the typed fields is not complete, and on documents where the seal carries the issuing office’s name, the omission removes information an officer may specifically be looking for.
Multi-page documents produce the same problem in a different form. A household record rendered only on the page listing the applicant leaves the rest of the document unaccounted for.
Summarized or interpreted content
Occasionally the English version paraphrases: condensing a lengthy court judgment into its outcome, or rendering an archaic Thai administrative phrase into what the translator believes it means in context. Both are helpful instincts and both create a mismatch between the source and what an officer reads.
Self-translation without certification
Translating your own documents is permitted. Translating your own documents and then omitting the certification — because it feels strange to formally attest to your own work — is a frequent and easily fixed error. If you translate yourself, the statement is still required, in the same form it would take from anyone else.
Checking a Translation Before You File
Most of the above is visible in a few minutes with the source document beside the English version.
- Is there a signed, dated certification attached to each document?
- Does that certification say both complete and accurate, and separately claim competence in both languages?
- Does every stamp, seal and handwritten note on the original appear somewhere in the English version, even if only as a bracketed description?
- Does the page count match the original?
- Do the names in the translation match the passport spelling exactly, including middle names and transliteration choices?
The last one is worth dwelling on. Thai names admit several defensible romanizations, and spelling a name differently from the passport creates a discrepancy across the file that has nothing to do with the quality of the work. Fixing it before filing costs nothing.
Decide the English spelling of every name from the passport, and use that spelling on every translated document in the file. Consistency across the set matters more than which defensible romanisation you chose.
If a Notice Has Already Arrived
Work from the notice itself. Identify the document named, and the specific deficiency described. Then obtain a corrected version addressing that deficiency, and respond within the period the notice sets rather than at the pace of ordinary correspondence.
If the work was prepared professionally, send the full notice to whoever prepared it. A provider that stands behind its work should read the notice and correct its own output without further charge.
Where the notice raises something beyond translation — the sufficiency of the evidence, the eligibility of the petition, the adequacy of the relationship record — that is a question for an immigration attorney rather than a translator. A translator can attest to what a document says. They cannot advise on whether a case is strong.
The translation requirement is at 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3). For what a Request for Evidence is and how response deadlines work, see the current USCIS filing guidance and your specific form instructions. Nothing here is legal advice. Last checked 19 August 2026.
How We Reduce the Risk
Everything we deliver includes a signed certification statement carrying all four elements above. Each document is checked by a second team member specifically for name spelling, dates, page count and seal descriptions before it leaves. Since 2008 we have prepared Thai–English translations for immigration filings, and if an officer questions our translation or our certification, we review the notice and correct our work at no charge.