When a US Divorce Decree Goes to Brazil for Averbação

What We Received

A client submitted a two-page apostilled divorce packet from the State of New Hampshire and asked for a [certified divorce certificate translation](/documents/divorce-certificate) into Brazilian Portuguese. The packet was being prepared for averbação — recording the foreign divorce on the spouse's Brazilian marriage certificate at a cartório de registro civil — and the country of destination box on the apostille named Brazil.

Page 1 was the New Hampshire Apostille issued by the Office of the Secretary of State (Apostille No. 2026-2314), authenticating the signature of the New Hampshire Justice of the Peace who had signed the underlying certificate. Page 2 was the underlying decree — the New Hampshire Certificate of Divorce, Civil Union (CU) Dissolution, Legal Separation Or Annulment, on form SOS/DVRA VS 14A Rev 12/2010 — completed by counsel and signed by the court official, with the divorce final in 2012 and a court official's date of 2013.

The packet did not need an inbound USCIS-style translation. It needed the opposite: a [reverse-direction English-to-Brazilian-Portuguese translation](/translate/portuguese-divorce-certificate) that a Brazilian cartório official could use directly.

How We Handled It

We mirrored the source layout exactly. The Portuguese DOCX reproduces the NH form as a grid of bordered cells with the same numbered field labels (Pessoa A, Pessoa B, Casamento / União Civil, Advogado, Decreto) and the same checkbox states ('☒ Feminino', '☒ Divórcio', '☒ Diferenças irreconciliáveis', '☒ Audiência não contestada', '☒ Juiz', '☒ Nome anterior ao 1º casamento ou união civil' for Person A, '☒ Mesmo nome atual' for Person B). The form ID line — 'SOS/DVRA VS 14A Rev 12/2010' — was preserved verbatim so the cartório can identify the source.

Every numeric date kept its source MM/DD/YYYY form and was immediately glossed in spelled-out Portuguese in parentheses: '01/28/1982 (28 de janeiro de 1982)', '08/09/2009 (9 de agosto de 2009)', '06/28/2012 (28 de junho de 2012)', '06/05/2013 (5 de junho de 2013)'. The numeric form keeps an audit trail back to the source; the spelled-out form removes the DD/MM vs MM/DD ambiguity a Brazilian reader would otherwise have to resolve from context.

'Justice of the Peace' and 'Marital Master' were retained in English with a parenthetical Portuguese gloss on first mention. A Translator's Note made the reasoning explicit: these are NH-specific judicial roles, and the cartório official needs the source title — not a guess at a Brazilian equivalent — to match the apostille against the underlying signature. Every blank field was marked '[Em branco no original]' (the State File Number, Person A's suffix, Person B's suffix and pre-marriage surname, the unfilled Number line on Item 17). The cursive court-official signature in field 32a was marked '[Assinatura ilegível]' over the visible court seal.

The standard French heading on page 1 — 'Apostille (Convention de La Haye du 5 Octobre 1961)' — was kept in French per the Convention's fixed format, and the surrounding apostille body was translated into Portuguese. On the certification page, the scope statement names both pages so the cartório can see, from the certification alone, that the apostille authenticates the underlying decree.

Expert Note

"The original is a two-page packet — page 1 is a New Hampshire Apostille (Hague Convention of 5 October 1961) issued for use in Brazil, and page 2 is the New Hampshire Certificate of Divorce, Civil Union (CU) Dissolution, Legal Separation Or Annulment, on form SOS/DVRA VS 14A Rev 12/2010. Dates in the original appear in MM/DD/YYYY format; they are reproduced in their original numeric form, accompanied by the spelled-out Brazilian Portuguese form in parentheses to remove any DD/MM vs. MM/DD ambiguity. Form fields left empty in the original are marked '[Em branco no original]'. The signature of the court official in field 32a (over an embossed court seal) is in cursive handwriting and is illegible; it has been marked accordingly. The titles 'Justice of the Peace' and 'Marital Master' are New Hampshire-specific judicial roles with no exact Brazilian equivalent; they are retained in English with a Portuguese gloss where helpful."

Natalia VegaIberian & Latin American Legal Translator

The Outcome

The two-page certified Brazilian Portuguese translation was delivered to the client for the cartório, packaged as a single DOCX whose body mirrors the original packet page-for-page, followed by a translator's certification that names both the apostille and the underlying decree. The cartório official, reading the Portuguese translation alongside the apostilled English original, can match field by field — case number, decree date, hearing official, court — without re-deriving the form's structure or guessing at an MM/DD date.

We have used the same approach on every reverse-direction US-to-Brazil court packet since 2024 — divorce decrees, court orders, name-change judgments — without a cartório re-do request on the form-grid or the US-title handling.