Bilingual Notaries – How Often Are They Needed?
This topic started off as a forum post. It is the most popular post in our tips section, but nobody replied to it. I was hoping for one reply in Spanish and another in Armenian, but no such luck for me.

123notary has hundreds of bilinguals
There are many bilingual notaries speaking every conceivable language from Amharic to Zulu. However, Spanish is by far the most common second language in the United States. Some notaries are native speakers of their “second” language, while others have varying degrees of competency.

Are you really bilingual?
If you want to advertise yourself as bilingual, you should be able to handle a signing purely in your second language. Even if you are not perfect and have to look up a word here or there, the ability to converse easily is the main point. The question — are you bilingual ENOUGH? is always a serious question. Notaries put “Some Spanish” in their language field all the time. Is some Spanish enough Spanish? If you can talk your way through the loan then its enough. But, please just put language names in the language field. Nobody uses our language filter to look up the language “Some Spanish”, or “Limited Spanish”. Either you can cut it or you can’t as a bilingual notary.

Test your bilingual notary
If you are hiring a notary for a bilingual signing, it is recommended to talk to them over the phone in the language they claim as their second to test them out. See how they handle basic conversation, and then throw a few loan signing technical terms at them to see how they function with specialized vocabulary.

Bilinguals are not always necessary
Most people in the United States who are getting a loan speak English, even if that is not their mother tongue. If you are notarizing documents for a family from Iran, knowing Farsi might make you popular with them (if you speak it correctly enough), but it won’t be so necessary as they will most likely speak English or have someone present who speaks English.

When do you really need one?
It’s when the signers really don’t know English that you need a bilingual notary. Bilingual notaries get a bit more business than they would if they didn’t have bilingual capabilities. However, if you are in an area where lots of borrowers speak only Spanish and there are no other bilingual signers around, you might get endless business due to your linguistic attributes which become a valuable commodity. How much extra business a bilingual signer gets is hard to say, but they really come in handy when you really need them.

Chinese anyone?
Chinese is a language that throws everyone. There are so many dialects and sub-dialects that a notary needs to specify which dialects they speak. I recommend putting this type of language in the language field: Chinese, Mandarin, Mandarin Chinese. This way, whatever language search term the browser types into the box, they will be sure to find your dialect and also have a correct idea of what you speak. Merely saying “Chinese” doesn’t cut it because there are so many Cantonese speakers in the United States, that many of them regard Cantonese dialect as being just “Chinese”. The governments of both Taiwan (ROC), and China (PRC) both use Mandarin as their standard and official language. The accent is quite different in both countries, but the language is fundamentally the same. Both China and Taiwan have regional dialects too. Taiwan has about eight different variations on their Min-nan-yu that varies from county to county, not to mention a large minority of Hakka speakers who speak a fairly different Southern Chinese dialect. Mainland China has 13 dialect groups with many subdialects that are often not mutually intelligible. Additionally, there are many ways to say Mandarin in Chinese:

(1) Guo-yu (country language – Taiwanese usage),
(2) Hua-yu (Chinese language)
(3) Zhong-guo-hua (Chinese language)
(4) Han-yu ( The language of the Han ethnic group. The name Han is from the Han dynasty and Chinese people refer to themselves as Han people.)
(5) Pu-tong-hua (the common people’s language – used in Communist China)

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