Legalising Chinese Documents for Qatar

Most documents start by needing to be notarised and certified. During this stage, a notary public will check the document is legitimate and sign & stamp it accordingly. Certain documents will require that the subject of the document has it notarised in person, and therefore cannot be completed by an agent. These include a School Transfer certificate or an Experience Letter.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs will generally only process documents in Chinese. The Qatar Embassy however will only legalise documents in English or Arabic, therefore they will need to be translated into English to be presented to them. This translation will usually be prepared with the Chinese and English side-by-side as a dual-language document. The original document is then bound together with the translation to be processed for legalisation.

Check out our translations page to learn more about the different types of translations, and what they're used for.

Before documents can be presented to the Qatar Embassy in Beijing, most need to have been legalised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During this process, the ministry will check the seal and/or signature of the original document, and that the translation has been legally produced. In some circumstances, such as the legalisation of a company or commercial document, other Chinese ministry certification may be required, such as the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT).

The final step in China is to have the document stamped, known as legalised, by the Qatar Embassy in Beijing. During this stage an official Qatar-government sticker and seal is applied to the document. This confirms to the authorities in Qatar that the document has completed all the required steps in China.

Once the document has reached Qatar, it requires a further attestation stamp by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Qatar which validates that your document has been processed correctly in China. Some employers make arrangements to handle this for you, so you should check whether this needs completing by you or not.

In certain circumstances, your document may also require translation into Arabic. Again, your employer may handle this for you so best to check. If required, the whole document and its relevant stamps are translated from English into Arabic by a recognised certified translator. Once the translation has been done, then everything has been completed to make it fully useable within Qatar.