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NYC Legal
Notary · Translation
NAATI Frequently Asked Question

Which romanisation should be used for Thai names in a translation?

Direct Answer

Always follow the passport spelling, even where a standard transliteration scheme would produce something different, because the receiving body matches names against the travel document first.

In-depth Answer

Several romanisation schemes exist for Thai, and passport spellings rarely match any of them exactly, since holders have at times chosen their own form.

The real-world failure is a translation that applies an academic transliteration while the passport uses another spelling, leading an officer to treat them as two different people and request further evidence.

The safe approach is to send the passport bio page with every translation job so one spelling runs through the whole set.

If you have previously lodged documents under a different spelling, or you have changed your name, say so: the translator can use the primary spelling and add a note explaining the variant that appears on the source, which heads off most queries.

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