We offer expert guidance on immigration processes, business opportunities, housing, and investment, ensuring you have all the resources for a successful and smooth transition to life in Colombia.
Whether you’re planning to relocate, start a new business venture, invest in real estate, or manage the legalization of your U.S. documents, we provide expert guidance every step of the way. Our team of specialists is dedicated to helping you navigate Colombian regulations, business requirements, and investment processes with ease and confidence. From visa applications and company formation to foreign investment certification and document apostilles, we offer personalized support tailored to your needs. Trust us to make your transition to Colombia smooth, efficient, and fully compliant with local laws.
The FD-258 fingerprint card is primarily used for obtaining an FBI Background Check. However, it is also accepted for other legal and administrative processes. At expatgroup.co, we provide a fingerprinting service that ensures the correct capture and printing of fingerprints on the FD-258 card, making it valid for multiple international procedures.
The FD-258 fingerprint card is the official form used by the FBI to collect and record fingerprints for criminal background checks. It is commonly required for various legal and administrative procedures, such as immigration processes, professional licenses, and other identity verification purposes.
If you are a foreign national, Colombian authorities generally require a background check from your home country rather than issuing one locally. However, if you have resided in Colombia for an extended period, you may request a judicial background certificate through official channels.
Obtaining an FBI background check from Colombia involves completing fingerprinting locally, submitting the prints to the FBI in the United States, and ensuring the document is legalized for use in Colombia. Our service provides comprehensive support for the entire process.
While Colombia does not directly conduct background checks on foreigners, applicants are being required to submit criminal record certificates from their home countries or other countries of a recent residence.
Background check is only required for some visas. But even if criminal records are mandatory only for certain visas, such as the retirement visa, the Colombian government has been requiring them as additional documentation for almost all visas, including marriage, investment, business, and digital nomad visa applications.
Any document drafted by a lawyer or a public official, as well as a large number of financial and academic documents with legal implications, need to be translated by a professional legal translator if it is to be used in a foreign country that speaks a different language than the country where the document originated.
The following are some of these documents:
And, in general, any legal, financial, academic, religious text, etc., which entails the creation of rights or obligations for a given party.
Expatgroup.co has, among its functions, that of a legal translation agency specializing in the translation of legal documents, documents issued by public administrations, business documents, financial documents, etc. For this purpose, our team of collaborators includes professional personnel specialized in the legal translation of documents in each of the aforementioned areas, which allows us to guarantee their absolute validity in Colombia and abroad.
The professional legal translator must have a solid academic background in law. But, at the same time, he/she will face multiple translation challenges throughout the text, so a solid background in the field of translation is also necessary. In addition, specialization in certain areas, such as education, finance, business, etc., is essential to be able to guarantee quality work in such complex subjects.
No, in many cases, the translation is not only informative but also seeks to produce a document with legal effects in another country, from which it is necessary to carry out previous research in comparative law. It is not enough, therefore, to be bilingual to translate legal documents adequately. It is not even enough to have extensive experience as a translator or in Legal Sciences in isolation. In addition to the two languages, it is necessary to have a perfect command of the two legal systems involved (that of the original text and that of the country of the target language) in order to avoid making regrettable mistakes with serious legal consequences for the addressees of the translation.
Legal translation consists of interpreting the contents expressed in one language and translating them into another in a manner appropriate to the legal and socio-cultural contexts of the countries involved. Legal documents, whether public (documents issued by an administration or public body) or private (drafted to regulate a specific contractual relationship between individuals or companies legally).
Legalization consists of certifying the legitimacy of the signature of a public official in the exercise of their functions, which has not been previously registered in the database of the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs or of the competent entity of the country where it was issued, in order for the document to be valid internationally. Legalization certifies the legitimacy of the public official’s signature stamped on the document but does not certify its content. It is appropriate to legalize a document when the country where it was issued or the country where it will take effect is not a party to the 1961 Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents.
Private documents may also need to be legalized. In Colombia, the signature of a private document must be recognized by a notary public, whose signature must, in turn, be registered in the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs database.
