Certified translation in Oman — the licence comes from Commerce, not Justice

Legal translation in Oman is licensed by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion, not by the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs. The governing instrument is Royal Decree 18/2003, the Law Regulating Legal Translation Offices, and Article 2 of it puts the power to license and to issue implementing decisions in the hands of the Minister of Commerce and Industry.

The regulator correction, and why it matters to you

Royal Decree 18/2003 was issued on 24 February 2003, published in Official Gazette No. 738 on 1 March 2003, and came into force three months after publication. It runs to fifteen articles. The word that appears throughout it is وزير التجارة والصناعة — the Minister of Commerce and Industry, whose successor department is MOCIIP. The Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs appears nowhere in it.

This is not a pedantic point. If you go looking for a Ministry of Justice list of approved translators in Oman, you will not find one, and the office that tells you it is on that list is either confused or describing a different country. The place a translation office is actually registered is a register kept at the Ministry under Article 4 of RD 18/2003 — which, as we set out below, is not published.

Who is allowed to hold the licence

Article 10 of RD 18/2003 sets the conditions for a licence applicant and for anyone doing legal translation work in the office. They explain a great deal about the shape of the Muscat market — in particular why there are far fewer licensed offices than there are people advertising translation.

• Omani nationality
• At least 21 years old
• Full legal competence
• Good character and reputation
• Fluent in Arabic — speaking, reading and writing
• A university or institute degree from a recognised institution teaching the target language
• A minimum of five years' practical translation experience after graduation, waived for graduates of specialised translation colleges
• No conviction for a crime affecting honour or trust, unless rehabilitated
• Premises meeting the Ministry's standards

Article 11 deals with foreign firms. A foreign legal translation office may operate in Oman only in partnership with a licensed Omani, and the foreign firm must itself have practised Arabic translation for ten continuous years, with certified proof. The partnership must be registered under Omani law.

The gov.om service card for the licence adds two details that do not appear in the decree text: the applicant must produce a certificate proving full-time dedication to the work, and in a partnership with a foreign office the Omani partner's share of capital must be at least 35%. The card also excludes joint ventures from the permitted partnership structures.

What the licence costs and how long it lasts

Article 5 grants the licence for five years, renewable, and empowers the Minister to set the licensing and renewal fees. Twenty-three years later we could find no ministerial decision issued under that power. What we did find is a published figure on the gov.om service card, which is an official government portal but is not the instrument the decree contemplates.

So the position on fees is: OMR 50 to open an office, from a government portal; nothing at all published for renewal, and no implementing regulation in existence to anchor either figure. If someone quotes you a renewal fee, ask them which decision it comes from.

What a compliant translation has to look like

Article 6 is short and worth knowing, because it is the test you can apply yourself to a document handed to you. Every paper issued by a legal translation office must carry the office name, the licence number, the translator's name, the translator's signature and the office seal. A translation with a stamp but no licence number does not meet Article 6.

Courts: Arabic is the language of litigation

This is the clearest rule in the whole area. Article 27 of the Civil and Commercial Procedure Law, Royal Decree 29/2002 (amended by Royal Decree 92/2005), reads: «اللغة العربية هي لغة التقاضي ولا تقبل أية أوراق أو مستندات إلا إذا كانت محررة باللغة العربية أو مرفقا بها ترجمتها العربية» — Arabic is the language of litigation, and no papers or documents are accepted unless drafted in Arabic or accompanied by an Arabic translation.

The same article allows the court to hear statements from parties or witnesses who do not speak Arabic through an interpreter, after the interpreter has been sworn. The law does not say who pays for the translation.

One live gap: Royal Decree 35/2025 established the Court of Investment and Commerce, dated 23 March 2025 and published in Official Gazette 1590 on 6 April 2025. The annexed law is behind a paywall on decree.om and we could not verify whether it permits English-language pleadings or documents. Do not assume it does, and do not assume it does not.

Notaries: the strictest rule in Omani law

The Notaries Public Law — Royal Decree 40/2003, amended by Royal Decree 51/2022 — contains the only provision we found that expressly names a legal translation office. Article 17 requires that all instruments drawn up by the notary be written in Arabic, and provides that a document written in a language other than Arabic may not be certified by the notary unless it has been translated through a legal translation office, after which the original and the translation are certified together.

Article 10 deals with the live encounter rather than the paperwork. Where the notary does not know the language of the parties, or a party is deaf or mute, the notary must proceed through a translator or expert who has been sworn in — «بعد تحليفه يمينا على أن يقوم بواجبه بصدق وشرف وأمانة». The translator's remuneration is fixed by the Deputy Chief of the Supreme Judicial Council.

That fee-setting power is the closest thing Omani law has to a translation tariff, and no tariff issued under it is published. So the one official who is empowered to price translation work has, as far as any public source shows, never published a price list. What you pay a Muscat office is a commercial rate negotiated with that office.

Who does not insist on Arabic

The Royal Oman Police is the useful counter-example, because it says so on its own page. The family joining visa requirements state that applications are "typed in Arabic for Arab nationals, and in English for non-Arabs". The ROP attestation requirements for a marriage certificate are about authentication — the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stamp, and for a foreign wife of an Omani national her own country's embassy plus MOFA plus a Ministry of Interior certificate. There is no Arabic-translation mandate on that page at all.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the other one. Its attestation page publishes a full fee list — educational certificates at OMR 10, marriage contracts at OMR 10, divorce certificates at OMR 20, commercial registration at OMR 30, trade agencies at OMR 60 — and never mentions translation. Neither does the Oman Post material that now carries the service. Whether MOFA will attest a document that is not in Arabic or English is not addressed by any published page.

Documents in a third language

If your document is in neither Arabic nor English — Farsi, Urdu, Russian, Chinese — there is no published Omani rule telling you what to do with it. We looked, in both languages, across the ministries above.

What can be inferred is thin but consistent. For a notarial act, Article 17 requires translation into Arabic and expressly through a legal translation office, so a third-language document has to be brought into Arabic and there is no English halfway house. For education, the Ministry's verification process treats English or Arabic as acceptable and lists translations as a document to be verified where the original is in another language — which implies the pivot for a degree may be English rather than Arabic. For courts, Article 27 admits only Arabic. Nothing published covers ROP or MOFA.

What no official source publishes

• No implementing regulation for RD 18/2003. Article 2 required the Minister to issue implementing decisions. We searched the legislation databases and the ministry decision indexes and found none in twenty-three years. The licence and renewal fees Article 5 empowers the Minister to set have no traceable instrument behind them.
• No public register of licensed translation offices. Article 4 mandates a register at the Ministry. It is not published. There is therefore no way for you to verify that an office is licensed other than asking to see the licence itself and checking the number against the stamp under Article 6.
• No translation fee tariff of any kind, notwithstanding the Deputy Chief of the Supreme Judicial Council's power under Article 10 of the Notaries Public Law.
• No statement, anywhere, on whether a foreign certified translation attested abroad is accepted in Oman. The only hard rule we found is the notarial one, and its wording — translation "through a legal translation office", read with the Omani-nationality licensing condition — points to an Omani-licensed office. For MOFA, ROP and MOCIIP there is simply no published position.
• No count of licensed offices. A press report on professional-office licences at MOCIIP did not load for us, and no breakdown for translation offices exists in any source we could reach.

The register gap is the one with real consequences. Because Article 4's register is not public, the market self-certifies: offices describe themselves as "approved", "certified" or "accredited" with no external check available. Ask for the licence number, and check it appears on the translated document as Article 6 requires. That is the only verification tool the published system gives you.

The Arabic search trap: عمان is also Amman

If you research this in Arabic you will hit a problem that has nothing to do with law. عمان is both Oman and Amman, the capital of Jordan. Searching «مكاتب ترجمة معتمدة في عمان» returns overwhelmingly Jordanian offices.

This matters because Jordan does have a published translation pricing culture and Jordanian offices publish rates. Every Arabic-language fee page we found in the course of this research was Jordanian, not Omani. If you are using an Arabic page to estimate what a translation should cost in Muscat, check the address at the bottom before you trust the number. In English, the equivalent trap is the UAE material described above.

Penalties

Article 15 of RD 18/2003 sets two tiers, and the second is serious.

• Practising without a licence, or breaching Article 7 (holding public office or work that compromises professional standards) or Article 8(3) (confidentiality): imprisonment up to 10 days and/or a fine of OMR 50 to OMR 1,000.
• Gross negligence in translation, or intentional falsification causing harm to the public interest or an unlawful benefit to a third party: imprisonment of one to three years and/or a fine of OMR 500 to OMR 2,000.
• Separately, under Article 13 the Minister's committee may suspend a licence for up to three months for breach of Article 6 or Article 8, and may revoke it where the holder loses a required qualification. Decisions must be written, reasoned and issued within 15 days.

Article 14 gives a right of appeal to the Minister within 30 days of a refusal, suspension or revocation, and the Minister's decision is final.

What we would actually do

For anything going to a court or a notary, use a licensed office in Oman and check the Article 6 markings. For anything going to the ROP or to MOFA attestation, ask first — neither publishes a translation requirement, and paying for a translation nobody asked for is the most common avoidable cost in this area. For a document in a third language, assume it has to reach Arabic, and expect to route through Arabic even where English might have done.

Our office is in Al Ghubra and we handle translation, notarisation and attestation as one file rather than three errands. If you want to know whether your particular document needs translating at all before you commit to it, that is a short conversation and usually the cheapest part of the process.