The Barely Visible Steel Seal on a Chinese Marriage Certificate

A 2024 Shanghai Marriage Certificate With a Seal on the Photo

A client sent three photographs of a 2024 Chinese marriage certificate (结婚证) from Shanghai and ordered a Chinese marriage certificate translation for a U.S. filing. A 结婚证 (jiéhūnzhèng) is the marriage certificate booklet a Chinese marriage registration office issues when it registers a marriage.

Each photograph shows one open spread. The middle spread is the data page, and a 钢印 (steel seal) is pressed into the lower part of the couple’s photograph there. The seal has no ink, so in the photos it shows only as faint relief.

The redacted image below shows that strip of the photograph magnified, above the page it belongs to.

How We Recorded the Steel Seal Without Guessing

We gave the steel seal its own bracketed entry, directly under the marker for the photograph. It says what the relief shows and nothing more.

Expert Note

"[SEAL: Colorless embossed seal impressed on the lower part of the photograph; its lettering is not legible]"

Wei LinTechnical & Business Translation Lead

Two details stayed out because the photo does not show them. The rules make the seal round and set it across the photo’s edge. Here the relief shows no outline, and below the edge it cannot be told apart from the security printing, so the English claims neither.

We also did not borrow the red seal’s legend. Some relief strokes fit the bureau’s name, but reading them that way would let the ink seal fill in letters the steel seal does not show. The registrar’s cursive signature got the same treatment: [Illegible signature], not a guessed name.

The two red seals are easy to confuse, so each got its own description. On the first spread’s left page, the Ministry of Civil Affairs (民政部) seal is part of the printed booklet, with 结婚证 overprinted across the lower part of its national emblem. The one stamped beside 登记机关 (registration authority), below the statement citing the 民法典 (Civil Code), is the district civil affairs bureau’s 婚姻登记专用章, added at registration.

Both 身份证件号 (identity document number) fields hold an 18-character 公民身份号码 (citizen identity number), built as RRRRRR YYYYMMDD SSS C. That is a region code, the person’s birth date, a sequence code that is odd for men and even for women, and a check character (0–9 or X).

We checked both numbers against that build. Each birth date matched the printed date of birth, and each sequence code matched the printed sex. Both check characters were correct, so both numbers were copied as printed.

The data page is printed at a right angle to the rest of the booklet. The client photographed every spread with the booklet held the way that page reads, so the other two came out on their side. We laid all three out upright in English and turned those two photographs upright in the attached copy.

A Translator’s Note on the certification page maps each photograph to its spread. A second note explains the date format and the Hanyu Pinyin romanization, family name first. For the spouses’ names, the English uses the Pinyin spellings the client supplied, letter for letter.

The Outcome

CertTranslate delivered the translation in September 2026 for the client’s U.S. filing, certified to the USCIS standard under 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3). The packet held three translated pages, a signed Certification of Translation Accuracy with two Translator’s Notes, and a copy of the three photographs.

All three seals in the photographs appear in the English: two by their legends, the steel seal as present but unreadable. So does a pale double-happiness character (囍) printed behind the spouses’ records.