So I’m reading through the guidance for certified copies of documents for the UK:
Who can certify a document
Your document must be certified by a professional person or someone well-respected in your community (‘of good standing’). You could ask the following if they offer this service:
bank or building society official
councillor
minister of religion
dentist
chartered accountant
solicitor or notary
teacher or lecturer
The person you ask should not be:
related to you
living at the same address
in a relationship with you
Does this mean that an engineer or IT consultant (professional) would be accepted to certify a copy of a document? Including a translation?
I…e if I take a document, say a birth certificate. Translate it myself (mothertongue in both languages), and then ask a colleague who can understand both to sign it, that would be “accepted”?
Check with whoever is requiring the documents if they’ll accept an “unofficial” translation. Having gone through an utter ARSE-ACHE with a bank that would accept either a translation from a translation company, or my sending the original documents in original language to the bank and their in-house translator doing the job, it’s definitely worthwhile finding out from the beginning what they’ll accept.
It’s for a UK passport application - so the government issuing that advice 
Almost certainly not.
The certified copy needs to have a stamp and a signature.
We usually get certified copies done at the commune office. It costs 10chf.
A certified copy just confirms that the copy is an exact reproduction of the original.
Adding translation into the mix is something different entirely and they will usually require an official translation.
That’s exactly what I thought, but at the bottom of that page it states:
Certifying a translation
If you need to certify a translation of a document that’s not written in English or Welsh, ask the translator to confirm in writing on the translation:
that it’s a ‘true and accurate translation of the original document’
the date of the translation
their full name and contact details
Which I found oddly “easy”
I think by translator they mean somebody official who does it for a living and not just some random individual you found.
It’s very easy to do. I work in an office full of accountants so I just ask one of them to sign the photo for me. I’ve been doing this for years.
For documents, you can sometimes get these in English e.g. I requested birth certificates with English to save on having to get translations.
In reality, I doubt they are going to check on the translation esp. if it is for something like “name” and “place of birth”.
If it’s just the child’s birth certificate and verification of the photo that’s needed for a child’s passport application then that works perfectly fine.
The international version of the Swiss birth certificate covers all the common languages anyway and English is on there.
It becomes a bit more complicated if it’s a copy of a certificate in one of the non standard languages where it’s more difficult to figure out what each part means and that’s when they usually ask for an official translation.
Alas, one of the documents to submit is a birth certificate from Yugoslavia (seriously) so written in Serbocroat (cyrillic).
So far, I count 22 documents to submit (counting the original and translation as two documents, as each translation is in the chf 25-100 range)…
The kid better be grateful