Apostille then translate: the document order that saves months
Someone preparing a purchase in the Aveiro area asked a simple-sounding question in a group: "Is there a service that can translate my legal documents from Portuguese to English?" It is a reasonable question, but the deeper trap is the reverse direction — the documents you bring from home — and above all the order in which you legalise them. Get the order wrong and you pay for everything twice.
The sequence
The rule is short, and it is the one thing most people invert on their first attempt.
1. Apostille in the country of origin — on the original document.
2. Certified translation in Portugal — the translator renders both the document and the apostille stamp.
Do the apostille before you move — arranging it from abroad after you have relocated is slow and painful.
The expiry trap
- Criminal-record certificates and similar documents are often valid only ~90 days — so timing matters enormously; get them too early and they expire before your appointment, forcing a reissue.
- Lived in several countries? You may need a police certificate from each place you lived for over a year — start early, because that is a genuine logistics puzzle across time zones and postal systems.
- Certified translations typically run ~€50–125 per document and 3–7 days; some apostilles, such as the FBI one in the US, take 4–8 weeks on their own.
- A criminal-record certificate is now mandatory for foreigners in many Portuguese processes — build it into the plan rather than discovering the requirement late.
The reason the order trips people up is that it is counter-intuitive. It feels natural to translate a document into the local language first and then get it stamped. But an apostille certifies the original document in its home country, so it has to go on the original before anything is translated — and then the translation has to cover the apostille too, otherwise a Portuguese office receives a stamp it cannot read. Do it backwards and you are paying a translator twice and losing a fortnight in between.
The other half of the problem is validity windows. A criminal-record certificate might be perfectly valid the day you request it and useless by the day of your appointment, because these documents age out in roughly ninety days. So the sequencing is not just apostille-then-translate; it is also getting the short-lived documents late enough that they are still fresh when submitted, while getting the slow apostilles started early. Map the whole thing on a calendar before you order anything.
The full order is in apostille and certified translations. These documents feed straight into your AIMA file, so read the first 120 days alongside it, since a single expired paper there means a refused appointment. Keep the whole paperwork run visible on your checklist.
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Guidance, not legal or tax advice — verify your case with official sources.