When a Mexican Acta de Defunción Prints Commas in the Place of Birth

An Apostilled Acta de Defunción From Baja California Sur

A client ordered an apostilled Mexican death certificate translation from Spanish into English. On the acta, the Lugar de nacimiento (place of birth) starts with a run of commas: four of them, with no entries between them. Then comes ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, printed twice, as the redacted image below shows.

An Acta de Defunción is the death certificate issued by a Mexican state’s Registro Civil (civil registry): a certified copy of the official record of a death. This one comes from the Registro Civil of Baja California Sur. It records a person born in the United States.

The second page is the apostille (apostilla in Spanish), issued by the state’s General Secretariat of Government. Its Tipo de Documento (Type of Document) line reads ACTA DE DEFUNCION. Its Referencias (References) line cites the acta’s folio, the serial number printed on the certified copy.

How We Kept the Commas and Certified the Acta With Its Apostille

We reproduced the field exactly as printed: four commas, then UNITED STATES OF AMERICA twice. A Translator’s Note explains where the commas come from, so they read as the form’s punctuation, not a translation error. The same rule kept a stray percent sign that ends the acta’s footer notice.

Fields that hold only a row of dashes got different treatment. The second surname and the Mexican state of birth registration print dashes because nothing applies, and we marked both [Blank in original]. The commas stay because they are part of a printed value, next to the country name.

Expert Note

"Translator’s Note: In the “Place of Birth” field the original prints a run of commas with no entries between them (“, ,,,ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA,ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA”): this is how the registry’s form joins its locality, municipality, state and country sub-fields when the first of them are empty. The punctuation is reproduced as printed. The place-of-death field contains the same kind of empty sub-field, the pre-printed postal-code label “C.P.” with no value after it."

Mateo GarcíaSenior Immigration Translation Specialist

The apostille names the document type and cites the acta’s folio. Its signer and capacity lines match the registry director who signed the acta. That ties it to this acta alone, so both pages share one certificate of translation, titled for a death certificate with apostille.

The original prints the Convention line in French, as Article 4 of the Convention requires, and we reproduced it as printed. Each field label appears in Spanish, English and French, and we rendered it once in English.

In item 6, the blue stamp covers part of the last digit of the year. We compared its visible strokes with the same typeface elsewhere on the sheet. The reading also had to fit the acta’s own issue date, since an apostille cannot predate the record it legalizes.

Both checks agreed, and a Translator’s Note records the obscured digit and how it was read. When a stamp hides text that nothing on the page can confirm, we mark it obscured instead.

Under the acta’s Firma Electrónica (electronic signature) heading, three lines of letters and digits form the Cadena Original, or original string. It is a Base64 encoding of the record data printed above it, including the CURP, Mexico’s 18-character population registry code. We copied it verbatim and left it untranslated, as with the electronic signature block on Mexican birth actas.

The acta’s typeface prints a capital I and a lowercase l identically. We kept the transcription that decodes without error, and the note says so.

The Outcome

We delivered the certified translation in September 2026 for a U.S. filing. No receiving authority was named, so the packet was certified to the USCIS standard for certified translations in 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3).

The delivered PDF holds the two translated pages, one certificate of translation with six Translator’s Notes, and a copy of both original pages. The comma run, the dashed fields and the stamped date all appear in the English, each accounted for.