The same requirement, in a different agency, with a different shape
Drug applications carry a parallel rule. The Food and Drug Administration requires an accurate and complete English translation of each part of a new drug application that is not in English. It also requires copies of the original literature publications for which translations are submitted.2
Note what that second clause does. The original and the translation travel together, so the two can be compared by anyone who wants to. That is a different mechanism from the immigration certification, and it serves the same purpose: making the translation checkable rather than trusted.
Competitions can go the other way entirely. The Academy Nicholl Fellowships require that submitted scripts have been written originally in English, and state that translations by a third party, including translation software, will not be accepted.3
Three regimes give three answers. Attach a certification, attach the original, or do not translate at all. Which one applies is published by the recipient rather than settled by convention.
What an editor may do to a translation, and what changes it into something else
The line is sharper here than on ordinary editing, because a translation is a claim about another document. Editing it can change what the claim says.
An editor may make a translated text read as English: word order, tense, article use, preposition choice, sentence length, and the removal of constructions that survive from the source language. An editor may point out that a sentence has two possible readings, that a term is used before it is defined, or that a figure in the text disagrees with one in a table.
An editor may not change what the translation says. Where the English is unclear because the source was unclear, correcting it is a translation decision rather than an editorial one, and it belongs to the translator who certified the document.
That distinction has a practical form. Every place an editor cannot recover the meaning becomes a query addressed to the translator, not a repair. Where a certification has been signed, an unqueried repair has altered a document somebody else attested to.
The consistency problem is larger than in a single-language document
A translated document usually exists in two versions that both remain in circulation, and often in more than two.
Terms decided in the English version have to hold across it, and the decisions have to be recorded somewhere the next translator can find them. Editors Canada's copy editing standards cover exactly this: maintaining a style sheet tracking abbreviations, the treatment of numbers, and vernacular usages, and resolving variations in terminology, logic, and mechanics.4
Numbers deserve a separate pass. Conversions between systems of measurement, decimal separators, and date formats all change between languages, and Editors Canada's standards name checking calculations and incorrect imperial or metric conversions among the copy editor's tasks.4
An editor can find every place the two versions disagree about a number. Deciding which version is right requires the source, and often the person who wrote it.
Where EditFast stops
We do not translate, we do not certify a translation, and we do not decide whether a translation is accurate to its source. Those belong to the translator, who signs for them.
What we do is work on the English: clarity, consistency, and whether the document says one thing rather than two. Where a sentence cannot be made to mean one thing without a decision about the source, we ask rather than choose.
Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including source documents, translations, and correspondence. We work on documents by multilingual writers and on regulatory submissions at whatever level a client's certification permits.
The useful brief on this work names the certified document and the person who certified it. Everything inside that boundary is a query rather than an edit, and everything outside it can be edited normally.