Bulgarian Translation Services

Where Bulgarian is spoken and where your translation is accepted

Bulgarian is the official language of Bulgaria and, since Bulgaria joined the European Union on January 1, 2007, an official language of the Union, which made Cyrillic its third alphabet, after Latin and Greek. It is also spoken by historic Bulgarian communities in Moldova, Ukraine, Romania and Serbia, and it has more than 7 million speakers. After 1989, and even more after 2007, many families moved to Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, where they still need their Bulgarian records translated. The destination decides the type of translation.

Bulgarian translation services: Cyrillic, names and the EGN

Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic, like Russian, but it is a different language, with its own letters, its own grammar and documents in formats of their own. A good translation reads the original as Bulgarian, writes every name the way the passport does and keeps every number of the original.

• Alphabet: Bulgarian Cyrillic has 30 letters, and since 2009 a law sets how they are written in Latin letters, so Ж is zh, Щ is sht and Ъ, a vowel, is a, which makes Търново read Tarnovo. Older passports may spell the same name differently, so Цветан can be Tzvetan or Tsvetan. The translation follows the spelling of your passport, so tell us the form used in your US documents when you order.
• Bulgarian and Russian: the two share the alphabet but not the reading, since Щ is sht in Bulgarian and shch in Russian, and Bulgarian has no letters Ы and Э. Bulgarian nouns have no grammatical cases and take the article at the end of the word, so книга is a book and книгата is the book. A Bulgarian document is translated as Bulgarian, never read as if it were Russian.
• Names: a full name has a first name, a middle name made from the father’s first name and a surname, as in Ivan Georgiev Petrov, son of Georgi. Women take a feminine ending, so his sister is Maria Georgieva Petrova. The middle name looks like a surname, and the translation keeps each part in its own field, so forms in the United States do not read it as a second last name.
• Dates and numbers: dates are written day, month and year with periods, so 03.10.2026 is October 3, 2026, often followed by г., short for year, and the months have their own names, so октомври is October. Decimals use a comma and thousands a space, so 1 500,00 is one thousand five hundred.
• Documents from Bulgaria: the birth certificate (udostoverenie za razhdane), the marriage certificate (udostoverenie za grazhdanski brak), the ID card (lichna karta), the criminal record certificate (svidetelstvo za sadimost) and the diploma with its supplement of subjects and grades. Most of them carry the personal number (EGN, ЕГН), with 10 digits, the first six taken from the date of birth. The translation reproduces every stamp, seal and note.