I also plan to make an inquiry at my local TECO about this, but 2 questions:
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Expiry date: When you “authenticate” a document like a death certificate at the TECO (nearest where the death certificate was issued), does that authenticated document then have some expiration date? In other words, is it possible that the HHR office in Taiwan will say, “this authenticated document is too old, sorry, you have to get a newer version of the authenticated document”?
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Notarization of Chinese translation: The TECO office’s homepage says that if you provide a Chinese translation, then it’s necessary to have the translation notarized by a Northern California, Nevada, Utah Notary Public. Sigh… that would be a huge waste of resources to need to fly to the US just to get something notarized, when the rest of the procedure can be handled by mail. Any suggestions or experience about how to handle this in practice? One option (discussed here) seems to be to have TECO in the USA authenticate only the English-language document. Then, with the TECO-authenticated English-language document in hand, prepare a Chinese-language translation of the document and get that translation notarized in Taiwan. That’s still a quite annoying burden, but flying to Taiwan is more practical at the moment than flying to the USA. This post also says that you can get only the English document authenticated by TECO (TRO), then do the Chinese translation separately and get that notarized in Taiwan (not by TECO/TRO): Translation and Certification of Documents - #11 by springonion . One other option might be to try to get TECO in the USA to authenticate the Chinese-translated document, but instead of using a California in-person notary public, instead use an online California notary service – but I’m not sure if TECO would accept an online-notarized translation instead of an in-person-notarized translation. If anyone has any experience in this area about the easiest way to handle the required notarization of translated documents, I’d be happy to hear your advice.