Foreign Documents

An attorney called yesterday with an interesting question: he had a deed from a foreign country, acknowledged by a notary in that country, written entirely in the language of that country. His question: would we accept the deed for recording? Probably not, was my response, but not for the reason you might expect. Article 8.4 of the Massachusetts Deed Indexing Standards is directly on point on the notary issue. That article, in subparagraph (1), states that an acknowledgement made outside of the U.S. is valid if made before “a justice of the peace, notary public or magistrate of the country in which the acknowledge is made.” Unfortunately, this rule only applies to recorded land since the Land Court guidelines have the additional requirement that “the identity and office of the notary public or justice of the peace are authenticated by a certificate described in MGL c. 183, sec. 33, sometimes called an ‘apostille,’ issued by the competent authority of the country from which the document emanates.” When formulating the Deed Indexing Standards back in 1999, the Registers of Deeds Association specifically voted to dispense with the “apostille” requirement which is why recorded land and registered land have different standards for recording. The problem with the deed in question, therefore, was not the acknowledgement but the foreign language. Although I can’t find a citation right now (if anyone has one, please send it along), we do have a requirement that any document that is written in a foreign language must have a certified translation attached to it before it can be recorded. The rationale for this is simple: our duty is to create a legible, useful record of land transactions for future generations to use. Allowing a document written in a foreign language to be recorded without a translation attached would tend to frustrate the ability of most future users of our records to make use of such a document. I expect that this issue might be included in the next update to the Deed Indexing Standards (expected release date of January 1, 2006), so if you have any comments, please send them along.