In the context of international mobility and migration, where highly sensitive documents relating to personal status or qualifications need to be translated, a certified translation of official documents is on the increase. A certified translation requires the involvement of a sworn translator who guarantees the exact reproduction of official documents to be registered with a foreign authority. As a personal status document, divorce decrees must also be translated with rigorous standards in order to be recorded elsewhere. The rules governing Arabic divorce decrees are codified separately in Arabic civil codes and refer to the Family Code or Personal Status Code. Matters related to personal status are subject to religious considerations and contain religiously charged terms that are strictly defined in accordance with the Islamic law and require special attention when translated. This paper aims to explore translation challenges of a particular type of Arabic civil status deed, namely divorce decrees. For this purpose, the study first explains the most prominent concepts relating to certified translation and to Arabic divorce decrees. A number of Arabic divorce decrees are then subjected to a descriptive analysis to define shared linguistic features and to outline the relevant translation techniques in dealing with religiously embedded terminology and phraseology. The relevance of this analysis is assessed by examining a French certified translation of an Arabic divorce document in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the approach to translating this legal genre.