Where can you find a sworn translator in France?

By Keran Chaussard, administrator of the Directory of Sworn Translators of France — updated on 2 October 2026

The official sources for sworn translators

The starting point is the list of court-appointed experts of each court of appeal. France has thirty-six courts of appeal, in mainland France and overseas, and each draws up its own list, revised every year by the general assembly of its judges. Translators and interpreters appear in branch H, separate from the other areas of expertise. A sworn translator can be registered on only one court of appeal list.

The Court of Cassation website centralises all these lists, which saves you from consulting the thirty-six courts one by one. There is also a national list of experts approved by the Court of Cassation, which is more restrictive and reserved for experts with a certain length of registration on a court of appeal list.

These official documents have two practical limitations. First, their format: they are PDFs running to several hundred pages, with no search function, sometimes organised by language and sometimes by name. Second, how up to date they are: a list is fixed at a given date, but registrations, removals and changes of contact details occur during the year.

Key point — the court of appeal lists are authoritative, but they are annual and published as non-searchable PDFs.

Other sources for finding a sworn translator

Regional associations of experts publish their own directories, often better structured than the official lists. The Société française des traducteurs (French Translators’ Society) also keeps a professional directory, in which some members are registered on a court of appeal list. Be careful, however: membership of a professional association is not the same as sworn status.

If you are abroad, French consulates and embassies publish lists of local translators. These lists serve a different purpose: they are for having a document translated for the authorities of the country you are in, not necessarily for a French authority.

How the Directory of Sworn Translators of France uses this data

The Directory of Sworn Translators of France takes the lists in force at the courts of appeal and makes them searchable by language, city, department, region and court of appeal, with each expert’s direct contact details. A search takes a few seconds, where you would otherwise have to go through several PDFs by hand.

A point of transparency: as these lists change during the year, no directory, including this one, can guarantee permanent completeness. If in doubt about a registration, the list published by the court of appeal concerned is authoritative.

Searches that fail, and why

The searches that most often fail on the Directory of Sworn Translators of France almost all concern rare languages. Kazakh and Finnish first of all, but also several African languages: Fula, Amharic, Soninke. For each of them, France has only a handful of registered experts across all court of appeal jurisdictions.

In these cases, the search fails not because no expert exists, but because it was run with a geographical filter. You need to go straight to a nationwide search, entering only the source and target languages, to see where the experts actually are.

Why a nationwide search makes sense for every language

This advice does not only apply to rare languages: it actually applies to all of them. The title of court-appointed expert is national. A translator registered on the list of any French court of appeal produces a translation with exactly the same legal value, wherever they practise.

In other words, filtering by city or department makes no difference to the admissibility of your translation: it simply reduces the number of results, sometimes to zero. Proximity is only an advantage if you need an oral service or a hand-delivered document.

Key point — the expert title is national: the legal value of the translation does not depend on where the expert practises. If your search is unsuccessful, remove the geographical filter before concluding that no expert exists.

Frequently asked questions

What should I do if no sworn translator translates my language in my region?

Run a nationwide search, with no geographical filter, entering only the source and target languages. For rare languages — Kazakh, Finnish, Fula, Amharic, Soninke — France has only a handful of registered experts, and a search by department almost never returns a result. As the title of court-appointed expert is national, the translation has the same legal value whichever court of appeal jurisdiction the expert is attached to.

Do you have to pay to consult the court of appeal lists?

No. The lists of court-appointed experts of the courts of appeal are public administrative documents that can be freely consulted on the website of each court of appeal and on that of the Court of Cassation.

Can a sworn translator be registered with several courts of appeal?

No. A sworn translator’s registration on a list of court-appointed experts is unique: they can appear on only one court of appeal list.

How do I know whether the list I am consulting is up to date?

Check the year shown at the top of the document. The lists of court-appointed experts are annual and revised every year by the general assembly of the judges of the court of appeal.

Sources

• Lists of court-appointed experts of the courts of appeal, centralised by the Court of Cassation
• Decree No. 2004-1463 of 23 December 2004 on court-appointed experts
• Decree No. 2021-1205 of 17 September 2021, amended by Decree No. 2024-1200 of 23 December 2024, on legalisation and the apostille
• Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 of 6 July 2016 on the circulation of certain public documents