PROOF of CONTACT How did we submit our CHATS? EXPORTS | SCREENSHOTS | TRANSLATION | PR CANADA 2022

all right so when it comes to spousal sponsorship one key element to prove the authenticity of your relationship with your partner especially during the times that you've been away from your partner is to provide proof that you've maintained contact with your partner which is why we're forced to look through our social media conversations from whatsapp facebook instagram imessage or whatever platform we are using to converse and then dig through our chats and provide those private and sometimes embarrassing chats to ircc so in this video we'll try to answer some common questions about proof of contact we'll start with the technical questions such as how to export chats or how to get screenshots then what method should you choose to provide these chats and whatever method you choose how to prepare these documents how to get them together how to organize them how to write description and how to submit them whether applying online or on paper and then we'll look more into some practical questions such as how much chat history is enough do you need translation how much to translate and what happens if you submit without translation also what are some good agencies that you can contact for translation and finally what if you don't have chat history at all so let's begin all right so before we begin first and foremost the instructions for proof of contact are in the document checklist 5533 which you can download from this page that you see on the screen here and i'm going to link it in the description below make sure you download the latest document checklist because 5533 has recently been updated all right so once you download the checklist it's going to look something like this then if you go to page 7 that's where you find the proof of relationship to sponsor section in this section there's a question which asks are you and your spouse currently living together obviously this particular section proof of contact applies to those who are not living together meaning it's an outland or family class application where the sponsor is probably living in canada and the applicant is living outside of canada so you're going to check this box no and then you will have to provide proof of contact all right so let's dive in so people primarily use two methods to get their chat history either taking screenshots from whatever social media apps that they were using to converse and then submitting those screenshots or exporting chat histories from their social media apps and then submitting those chat histories so let's look at both those methods one by one let's look at how you can export your chat from whatsapp facebook and instagram so for whatsapp it's pretty straightforward you simply open your whatsapp select the contact obviously this is going to be your partner and just hit export and then you can email the chat to yourself you'll soon get a text file which is going to look something like this and more on what to do with this file in a second not much different for facebook you can simply go to your ios or android device hit this gear icon then profile settings and then select download your information in this you're going to select messages unselect everything else because that's what you want scroll down and then this is where you select the time frame so i would say select the time frame that you guys were chatting for any time frame that you think is good enough and leave the format as html quality as medium to reduce the size of the download and hit download then you'll soon get an email that your file is being processed soon and soon after that you'll get this email that says the file is done click on download and then you'll probably get this folder downloaded to your desktop so same thing you can do for instagram just a slightly different process to export instead of going on your phone you are simply going to go to instagram.com on your desktop then go to settings privacy and security request download select html hit next enter your password and bam you should get an email in about 20 minutes or so that your file has downloaded and it's going to look something like this again you're going to get a similar looking folder with your name downloaded to your downloads folder so open this folder go to messages inbox select the contact with which you were chatting and there you go all your instagram chat messages with that person are right here all right so let's look at how to prepare these for upload so first up is whatsapp chat history so i just showed you how to export the whatsapp history it's probably going to be delivered to your email so i simply downloaded the chat history but as a txt file from whatsapp and this is the txt file that you see on the screen here and i'm going to copy everything into a word document so for word documents i use google docs because it's very easy to manage you can use your microsoft word also so i'm simply going to click on new google docs and i'll have a blank document and this is where i'm simply going to paste all the chat that i copied from the txt file and as you can see each and every line item has a timestamp and a date and it's all very neatly organized in ascending order so from the oldest to the most recent and it's about 62 pages of conversation history all right now at the top i can also add some description just to make it easier for the officer to understand so i have a copy description which i'm simply going to paste in a second so i simply added a little bit of description whatsapp conversation between apoorva mishra applicant and suesh gautam the sponsor so that they know who the conversation is between the timeline of this conversation the kind of application so it's a family class spousal sponsorship or outland sponsorship application application method was online and the application was submitted by sush gotham the sponsor on october 27 2021 and just some additional notes about the timeline gaps between these chats if the officer were to identify those gaps so you can add as many details as you want for example couples often use different names for each other so your spouse's name might be stored as a different name in your phone and that is probably the name that is going to be exported in this chat so what you can do is you can also write another line in which you can explain that wherever you see this name this name represents the actual name of the applicant and this particular name represents the actual name of the sponsor so now that your chat is organized here what you can do is you can simply hit file and download whether as a microsoft word document or as a pdf document because both these formats are accepted by the online portal i prefer the pdf version because it's much cleaner so i'm simply going to hit pdf and it's going to download this entire file to my downloads folder so this is the pdf version of the file much more cleaner organized systematic and arranged by timestamp lots of emojis as you can see so this is a good file so the first thing i'm going to check for this document is its size so as you can see the size is 691 kb which means that this file is within the four megabyte limit which the online portal allows so i don't need to do anything with the size but as far as the naming i'm just going to rename it to last name first name proof of contact this is just an adherence with the naming convention that the online portal has and now that my file is ready for upload i'm simply going to log into the online portal under whatever account you're using this is the permanent resident portal to submit the application i'm going to scroll down to the supporting documents section and in the other category because there's no category for proof of contact i am simply going to upload this chat history which i just converted so let's look at facebook so this is the facebook folder that i just downloaded using the export process that i showed you so i'm just going to open this folder messages inbox i'm simply going to locate my wife because it gives you all the contacts that you've had conversations with on facebook so this is my wife right here and inside the folder of my wife in messages which is an html file all the chat history between me and my wife is right here as you can see each and every line item again is organized by timestamp from the most recent to the oldest including every detail about the chat the links we've shared the video chats that we have had the emojis we've shared the gifs we have shared the pictures or videos that we have shared a good proof of conversation and contact so now that i'm satisfied with the file i'm simply going to hit control p on my windows keyboard or command p on my mac keyboard to bring up this dialog box and as you can see this is ready to prepare it for a pdf and it is a 94 page file so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select just for the purpose of this video even pages only now as you can see it brings the file size down to 47 pages now if i look at the file right here as you can see it has been saved but the size is 4.7 megabytes so the online portal because i did the application online is not going to allow any file which is larger than 4 so now i may have to do a little bit of compression very easy to do just go to google hit compress pdf and then you can go to any links that pop up i like to use small pdf i'm simply going to upload the file that i just prepared now it will convert it it takes a second and as you can see the basic compression the file size now becomes 2.66 megabytes i'm going to select this and hit compress and it's going to download the compressed file back to my downloads folder so as you can see the file has now been compressed and it's 1.1 megabytes so it's well within the limits of the online portal so it will allow me to upload this and i'm simply going to remove this compressed from the name just to make it clear and now if i open this even after being compressed the file still looks pretty clear all the chat timestamps each and every detail is very clearly identifiable so now i'm happy with the file i'm simply going to go back to the online portal and under the other category upload this file as the facebook conversation history all right now if you were to submit this application on paper then you won't have to use the online portal then you'll just take printouts of the pages of your chat history from the exported file and then you will attach that chat history in your application packet and then mail in your application packet at the destination all right so next up is screenshots so this is also a method people use to submit their proof of contact and it works but personally i'm not a fan of this method and i'm gonna explain in a second but just in the spirit of education let me show this method to you anyway it's fairly straightforward you take your phone and whatever social media app that you use for conversation take screenshots of your conversation from that app organize those screenshots and then you can simply submit them so just to give you some context i sent the sponsorship application for my wife october 2021 i was the sponsor living in canada my wife was in india at the time so this was an outland or family class application hence the need for proof of contact so at the time that i sent the application my wife and i had been living away from each other since july because july is when i left india for canada so basically we were away from each other for four months before i sent the application so i had to provide proof that i'd maintain contact with my wife in these four months july august september and october so now if i were to submit all the screenshots of all the chat that we've had in these four months then it's just going to be copious amounts of screenshots and it just did not seem logical so what i would have done instead is taken screenshots from our conversations from each month and then i would have submitted them together so let me show you how i've organized that file so as you can see on the screen here i've copied all the screenshots for the four month time period that i talked about and organized them in this google document so on the front page i've just written basic description this is whatsapp conversation between pulva mishra applicant and suesh gautam the sponsor here's the timeline of the conversation july through october 2021 the time that we were away application is family class and here i also provided the contact numbers basically the numbers that we used to converse now as you can see on the next page i've provided the contact cards from whatsapp from both of our phones just to verify that these are the two people that are having the conversation so this is the applicant contact card screenshot from whatsapp and this is the sponsor's contact card from whatsapp because these contact cards are taken from whatsapp and the screenshots that will follow will all have the same name and same images which are reflected in these contact cards it just makes a solid case okay so from each month i provided the screenshots from my phone the sponsor's phone and from my wife's phone the applicants from and i put them side by side so as you can see right here this is the screenshot from my phone that's why it shows my wife's name the same name that showed up on the contact card and this is the screenshot from my wife's phone with my name listed here and this name and this image matches the image that was on the contact card just for additional proof now you can probably understand why i'm not a fan of this method because it's too tedious to get all this done so again what i did was to choose a few screenshots from each month one or two from july three or four from august and same from september and a couple from october as well just to prove to the officer that during the time that my wife and i were away we have maintained consistent contact okay if i were to choose all the conversation screenshots that we've had then this file is going to become too large and it just didn't make sense to me and that's not something that they're expecting also you don't have to select large number of screenshots to submit first of all it's going to make your file too large and it's just going to increase the amount of work that you'll do it will be too laborious also it's just a headache for the officer to go through your screenshots if you submit like 500 pages worth of screenshots now in order to further solidify your case you can even take screenshots of your audio or video call logs whatsapp also keeps a record of those and you can do the same thing what you've done for whatsapp with facebook instagram or whatever social media app that you've used for conversation all right so now once your file is ready all you'll do is hit file and then you can download this either as a microsoft word document or a pdf i prefer pdf so i'm just going to hit pdf as you can see this file that just downloaded is 6.1 megabytes so again if you're submitting it online the online portal at this point doesn't allow a file larger than four megabytes so you will have to compress this and once the file is compressed it's going to give me the option to download and this is the downloaded file as you can see it's only 368 kilobytes and the file still looks organized clear and readable and once the file is ready i'm just going to label it similarly last name first name proof of contact and i'm just going to add whatsapp just for additional clarification and that's it now i'm simply going to log into the online portal and upload this under the supporting documents section in the other category [Music] so now which method to use exporting your chat or using screenshots technically both the methods work people have had success with both and there's nothing wrong in choosing either one but like i just showed you the screenshot method is a little bit tedious so you have to do a lot of work to get that organized and in the right format to submit whereas in the export method all you have to do is simply click on export and your entire chat history is delivered to you organized and structured so again both the methods i've showed you go with what you were comfortable with right so now that you're ready with your chats the next question is how many pages do you submit the document checklist clearly says that you have to submit 10 pages i clearly did not follow that policy i submitted 60 pages as i just showed you so why was it still acceptable so this is my theory and i could be wrong but i think that the 10 page requirement is for the on paper applications because if you submit like 500 pages of conversation history on paper it's just too much paperwork for the officer to handle and it's a headache for them because like if everybody started submitting hundreds of pages of conversation history on paper it would be too much paperwork for the immigration officer to manage and that's why they have this requirement for 10 page so if you're submitting the application on paper then take your conversation history and then you can pick out certain pages from within that conversation history that you think will justify your case the best again you don't have to strictly stick to 10 pages but don't exceed the number of pages don't go like 50 or 100 pages when you are submitting it on paper but if you're submitting the application online like i did my entire conversation history was 62 pages but in a single file which i just uploaded in the online portal so now the officer that looks at my application doesn't have to handle like 62 pages of paper of my conversation history with my wife he can simply open the file that i submitted he can download it he can view the file and once he's satisfied he can simply close it or delete it so that's why when submitting online there is no paperwork involved and you have more flexibility on picking out your chat history and providing a chat history for a longer period of time so clearly there is a requirement in the document checklist to translate all the proof of contact documents which are not already in english or french so how does that look like practically so let's say you wrote to your partner how are you in english this obviously doesn't need translation even this which is the french version doesn't need translation but if you wrote to your partner this needs translation because obviously it's in a different native script if you wrote this this also needs translation even if you wrote this which is written in english but actually spoken in a different language this also needs translation okay so this was just to clarify what kind of documents need translation it has to be in spoken and written english in order to not translate if it's not in spoken and written english then you will have to translate that is what the requirements say now let's look at the practical approach so let me tell you what i did i submitted 60 pages of conversation history like i just showed you and i did not get anything translated a simple export and i uploaded it to the online portal the conversations between me and my wife were a mix of hindi and english and i just submitted the file as is no translation and a couple of my subscribers have also told me that they did not get anything translated and their applications were approved also a few of my friends actually did the submission without any translation so what's happening here why were their applications still accepted my theory is and i could be wrong that if the rest of your application is pretty strong then your untranslated chats are not really given much importance you still will submit your chats but even if you submit them untranslated assuming that the rest of your application is strong you're probably going to be given a pass with the untranslated chat history so what do i mean by a strong application so these are your official or government documents that you submit as part of your application so marriage certificate birth certificate police clearance evidence of financial support using bank statements government ids with the same address or your insurance policies clearly identifying each other as your spouse or you know employment benefits these are official documents that make your case really strong so assuming that you have all these documents really strong then when you submit the chats even if you submit them untranslated they are not given that much priority that's my theory so i'm not suggesting that you should not translate these proof of contact documents you absolutely should because that's what is mentioned in the document checklist and it's always safest to abide by the instructions but you should still focus on your other documents which are the official or government documents to prove your relationship and by the way these official or government documents if they are not in english or french you absolutely have to get them translated in english or french otherwise your application might be returned so don't at all risk your application with untranslated official documents so there are two ways to get your proof of contact documents translated through a certified translator and through a non-certified translator so let me take you to this page this is the official government of canada page about translation and it has all the instructions on what documents to provide when you are using a certified translator versus using a non-certified translator so the only difference between using these two methods is if you are using a non-certified translator apart from all the other documents that you have to provide as part of your translation process you also have to get an affidavit of accuracy and you can get this affidavit from a notary public in canada or from a notary public or equivalent agency outside of canada okay so my recommendation would be to go with a certified translator you simply have to provide them the document that you want translated and then they will translate it and they'll provide you a certification along with the translated document so now what you do is you combine your original untranslated proof of contact document with the translated document and the certification from the agency and then you upload all of that in the online portal now if you use a non-certified translator you will upload all these documents along with the affidavit of accuracy which you can get from a notary so a simple google search will give you a list of certified translators and then you can do your own research and go with whoever you like but based on my research on forums and talking to people and even talking to my subscribers i found that this company docsbase.ca which you can see on the screen right here is a good certified translator now this video is not being sponsored by this company or anything but based on my research i found that a lot of people have used docsbase.ca and seem to be recommending it so i thought i'd share this with you so this is the website and i'm going to link it in the description below so it's fairly straightforward to use you just simply type your name email your phone number and upload your document and somebody from their website is probably going to get back to you with a quote an estimate of how much it will cost you then there is another website that's translation agency of ontario this is also certified and it's slightly expensive from based on what i found in my research but you can also use this one these are just two examples that i found that people have used but again feel free to do your research and if you find a translation agency that's even better and more cost effective than these ones then by all means go with that all right so there is no right answer to this it is very subjective depends on personal preference and affordability but if i were to get my chat history translated this is the route i would take i told you i submitted 60 pages of conversation history obviously i am not going to translate all 60 pages of conversation history it's just going to cost me a lot so what i would do is i would pick out five or six pages or even 10 pages from that conversation history basically a small subset get that translated now when i submit my chat i'm going to submit the original 60 pages of untranslated history then i'll also attach the translated five or six pages and the certificate of translation and that makes sense for me but you obviously can translate more pages but i just told you my approach that way i'm also abiding by the instructions in the document checklist so i'm getting translation done but i'm also thinking about it practically and not spending a lot of money on translation so let's assume you're one of those couples who don't really have much of a social media presence so what can you submit in that case to prove that you've maintained contact with your partner during the time that you're away so in that case again you have to go back to the stronger documents which are the official or government documents that link you to each other so your marriage certificate proof of financial support so bank statements or insurance or employment documents that link you to to each other or proof of past cohabitation joint history or any other official or government documents that identify the two of you as each other spouse and on top of that you can provide screenshots of your audio or video calls or text messages that you may have exchanged with each other or if you've written emails to each other then basically just take printouts of those emails or nobody does that anymore but if you've written letters if you are one of those old school people then no problem provide the copy of those letters so think of the ways in which you can prove your contact because you must have maintained contact some way as long as the rest of your application is strong whatever means you choose to provide proof of contact should work all right hope this helps so just like chats there's a lot of confusion about proof of funds for the sponsor when sponsoring the spouse should the sponsor be employed or can they sponsor when they are unemployed how much income should the sponsor be making how much funds does the sponsor need to have in their bank account to prove that they can take care of their spouse so i covered all that in this video which should be showing up on the cards here and it's linked in the description below check it out it should be really helpful this is hit submit in canada my name is sweesh and i'll catch you the next one night [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hit Submit & Canada

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Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022