When Handwritten N and H Are the Same Letter on a Birth Certificate

What We Received

A client submitted a Senegalese Extrait du Registre de Naissance (Extract from the Birth Register) issued by the Civil Registry of the Commune of Thiénaba (Centre Secondaire), in the Arrondissement of Thiénaba, Thiès Region. The certified [birth certificate translation](/documents/birth-certificate) was needed for a USCIS filing.

The form is a pre-printed Senegalese civil-registry sheet — registry entry No. 501 of 2001, child born on 4 August 2001, certified extract issued on 13 May 2016 by Civil Registry Officer Codou Fall. The handwritten entries are made in clear, deliberate capitals — the writer is not careless. But the same writer draws capital N and capital H as the same shape: two vertical strokes joined by a horizontal bar.

The result is that the place-of-birth field reads literally as "THIEHABA SECK" and the father's-first-name field reads literally as "ALASSAHE." Neither is a real Senegalese name.

How We Handled It

We rendered the handwritten place of birth as "THIÉNABA SECK" — Seck being a known sub-locality within the Commune of Thiénaba — because the same form's printed letterhead establishes the spelling "THIÉNABA" beyond doubt. By implication the writer's middle glyph is "N," not "H." Once the writer's glyph identity is fixed at "N" for that field, it is fixed for the whole document.

We then applied the same identity to the father's first name and rendered "ALASSAHE" as "ALASSANE" — the standard Senegalese form of the name. We did not introduce a guess; we applied a finding already established within the four corners of the same document.

Both renderings are documented in a single combined Translator's Note. The note states the writer's glyph identity, lists the two affected fields, and gives the literal handwritten reading and the rendered reading for each. A USCIS adjudicator who compares the original side-by-side with the translation can verify the basis of each decision in seconds.

Expert Note

"The handwriting on the form does not graphically distinguish between capital "N" and capital "H": both letters are drawn as two vertical strokes joined by a horizontal bar. This affects two handwritten entries. (a) The place of birth is handwritten as "THIEHABA SECK," but the printed letterhead of the same document (REGION OF THIÈS, DEPARTMENT OF THIÈS, ARRONDISSEMENT OF THIÉNABA, COMMUNE OF THIÉNABA) uses the spelling "THIÉNABA" with an unambiguous printed "N." The handwritten entry has accordingly been rendered as "THIÉNABA SECK" (a known locality within the Commune of Thiénaba). (b) The father's first name is handwritten as "ALASSAHE" and has been rendered as "ALASSANE," the standard Senegalese form of the name. The original handwritten readings are noted here."

Sarah JenkinsAcademic Credential Translation Specialist

Two further translation notes accompanied the certification block. The original birth date, written numerically as "04/08/2001" in French DD/MM/YYYY format, was rendered as "August 4, 2001" — the unambiguous US written form. The entire central section of the form (Justice of the Peace, judgment number, registration date and year) is blank and crossed through with a single diagonal line in the original; rather than enumerating each empty field, the translation reproduces the section once with the note "[The entire central section above is blank and crossed through with a single diagonal line in the original.]"

The signatory's name appears as a blue rectangular name stamp reading "CODOU FALL" with a free-form handwritten signature overlaid on top. The translation describes the two elements separately — "[STAMP, blue, in box: CODOU FALL]" followed by "[Handwritten signature overlay]" — to make clear that the printed name is a stamp, not a signature.

The Outcome

The certified translation was delivered to the client for inclusion in their USCIS filing. The Translator's Note provides full visibility into the handwriting ambiguity and shows that each rendered name follows from a verifiable feature of the source — not from translator preference.

Cross-referencing a handwritten ambiguity against the printed letterhead of the same document is a routine technique for francophone West African civil-registry forms, where the pre-printed body of the form carries far more typeset reference text than a typical US vital-records sheet. We have applied the same printed-letterhead cross-reference on Senegalese, Ivorian, Cameroonian, and Burkinabè birth-certificate extracts — the printed reference is almost always available somewhere on the form.