E-certified (electronically signed) Hungarian translations
Our translation agency uses NETLOCK, the market leader in electronic document authentication, as its certified electronic signature service. Electronically signed private documents with full evidential value have the same legal effect as printed, stamped, signed documents and are accepted in all EU Member States. |
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The signature complies with the eIDAS (Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council on electronic identification and trust services) and the Hungarian e-Administration Act (Act CCXXII of 2015 on General Rules for Electronic Administration and Trust Services) and will remain authentic in the long term.
1. Open the e-authenticated document in Acrobat Reader. The header tells you what to do (in the target language):
2. Click on the header. The certificate provider will confirm via the Internet that the document is valid, when it was signed, that it has not been modified since, and that the source of the trust is the EU (on the system language):
3. Click on the 'Show Signing Certificate' button to display more information:
My device does not have AcrobatReader, what should I do?
E-certificated documents can also be checked online
with the Hungarian Governments Electronic Signature Verification Service
with the Digital Signature Services of the European Commission
and with the validator of the Austrian Regulatory Authority for Broadcasting and Telecommunications
What will happen to paper translation validation?
We will continue to offer them; the security elements of our printed documents are described in detail on the page SECURITY ELEMENTS OF OUR PRINTED DOCUMENTS (hungarian-translator.hu) . However, the future belongs to e-documents because they are tamper-proof.
Legal background
Our translation services issue electronically signed documents certified in accordance with the EU Regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions (eIDAS). According to Article 22...
(1) Each Member State shall establish, maintain and publish trusted lists, including information related to the qualified trust service providers for which it is responsible, together with information related to the qualified trust services provided by them.
As shown on the certificate, the source of the trust is the EUTL (European Union Trusted Lists). Among the Hungarian electronic signature issuers published on its official website EU Trust Services Dashboard (europa.eu) is Netlock ZRt.
Article 35 Legal effects of electronic seals
3. A qualified electronic seal based on a qualified certificate issued in one Member State shall be recognised as a qualified electronic seal in all other Member States.
Article 41 Legal effect of electronic time stamps
(3) A qualified electronic seal based on a qualified certificate issued in a Member State shall be recognised as a qualified electronic seal in all Member States.
Article 52 Entry into force
This Regulation shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.
On the basis of the above, our e-certified documents shall be accepted by the offices and authorities of all Member States of the European Union as if they had been translated by us.
AcrobatReader is published by Adobe in the United States (the most widely used PDF-reader; the file format itself is a product of Adobe Systems). eIDAS electronically signed documents can be verified with AcrobatReader, but also online with the Government Electronic Signature Verification Service or with the validator of the Austrian Rundfunk und Telekom-Regulierungs-Gmbh.
A brief history of the electronic signature
As long as people have been issuing documents securing rights or goods, there have been methods to authenticate them. Authentication is the process of ensuring that whoever receives a document is assured that it was indeed issued by the authority that has the right to do so.
The authentication technique has always been a process that was beyond the reach of the average person in that era. It was authenticated by wax seal, individual ink and paper. Notaries and translators still use tricolour braids to staple pages together, lawyers use embossed dry stamps, and the old freehand signature is still in use. Documents that require the strictest security, such as banknotes, are full of security features: colour-changing, intaglio and iridescent printing, metallic thread, watermarks, Braille script and microprinting.
However, whatever techniques were developed by issuers, others sooner or later learned to counterfeit them. The mentioned techniques are now widely available and signatures can be imitated. This is why electronic signatures have been developed for the information society era.
E-authenticated documents
The authenticity of electronically signed or authenticated documents can be verified using computer tools connected to the internet. Unlike any previous authentication, this also proves that the signatory has produced the document with the same legible content as before, without any pixels having been changed. By clicking on the signature field in such PDFs (typically in the header), an independent signature provider confirms who (which organisation) produced the document and when.
In the era of e-documents, another problem is a thing of the past. In principle, the institution of the return receipt was developed as a means of proving receipt of postal items. The postman signed the return receipt at the delivery point with the addressee and then handed over a sealed envelope. But what did this receipt prove? Only the fact of a reception. What exactly was in the envelope, it did not (without questioning the infallibility of the signatures scrawled on the door). So in the past, the sender and the addressee could in principle claim anything about the contents of the document - or even the envelope.
The digitization of official documents offers a solution to this problem as well. As mentioned above, the authentication service provider reports back the identity of the sender and the time of issuance and that the document was issued with the exact content. Thus, the content is undeniable by both the sender and the recipient. The undeniability of delivery is increasingly ensured or at least attempted by state authorities through portals such as the Hungarian customer portal ("ügyfélkapu"), company portal ("cégkapu") - in that documents sent there are considered delivered by law.
