Court and Certified Translation Editing and Proofreading Services

A certified translation is a document plus a statement about it. The translation may be excellent and still be rejected — by a court registry, an immigration authority, a university admissions office or a registrar — because the certification does not say what that body requires it to say, is not signed by someone whose qualification is stated, or does not connect unambiguously to the document it accompanies. The client discovers this at a counter, having paid, with a deadline.

We edit what certified translators, sworn translators and legal translation providers produce — certification statements and translator declarations, affidavits and statements of truth accompanying translations, formatting conventions for certified documents, translator qualification and credential statements, source document description and identification, handling of illegible, missing or damaged text, treatment of seals, stamps, signatures and handwritten annotations, notarisation and apostille explanations for clients, requirements guidance by receiving authority, court bundle and exhibit conventions, interpreter and translator terms of business, confidentiality undertakings for legal material, and client guidance on what certification does and does not mean. Our editors work on the statement, not the translation.

The certification statement is the part that gets documents accepted or returned, and it fails on small mechanical points. We write these so the statement identifies the source document unambiguously — by title, date, issuing authority, reference number and number of pages, since "the attached document" is not an identification once the pages are separated; so the translator's qualification and the basis of their competence is stated rather than asserted, with membership number where one exists; so the scope is precise, covering whether the whole document or an extract was translated and what was omitted; so anything illegible or ambiguous in the source is recorded in the statement rather than silently resolved, because a translator who guesses at a smudged date has created a document that says something the original does not; so seals, stamps and signatures are described rather than reproduced or ignored; and so the statement matches the receiving authority's stated requirements, which differ and which the client will not have checked. Getting this right is unglamorous and is the whole service.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including legal documents, personal information and material under court restriction. We are editors rather than translators, lawyers or notaries, and we offer no view on translation accuracy, certification requirements, notarisation, apostille or the requirements of any receiving authority. What we can do is make the statement complete, unambiguous and matched to what is being asked for.