What we will not promise
“Certified” describes the translation, not the translator
The word is doing two jobs at once, and only one of them is on the piece of paper.
What you will see advertised
“Your document will be handled by one of our certified translators.”
Read it once more and notice which noun the adjective is attached to. That single move — from the document to the person — is where almost every misleading sentence in this trade begins, which is why this page comes first and why the rest of them are versions of it.
What is actually true
In the United States a certified translation is a translation with a signed certificate attached to it. There is no licence to hold, no register to be on and no examination anybody is required to have passed. The word describes the document.
So the question worth asking a company is not about its adjectives. It is who is going to translate this particular document, what their background in the pair is, and what happens if it turns out to have gone wrong.
Why this is worth a page rather than a footnote
The word is doing one job on paper and a different one in the reader's head, and a company that prefers the second job has no reason to correct it.
The federal regulation that immigration filings run on asks for a translation and a statement, signed by the translator, that they are competent in both languages and that the translation is complete and accurate. It asks for nothing about the translator's qualifications, because there is no national qualification to ask about. Some translators have passed a professional body's examination and many excellent ones have not, and neither fact is what makes a translation certified. So a company that advertises “certified translators” is either naming a credential it should be willing to show you, or borrowing the authority of a word that belongs to the piece of paper.
What we do instead
What we will tell you is who translated your document, that they signed the certificate, and that you may ask us for their background before you instruct us. Nobody on this site is described as certified, accredited, licensed or approved, because these are invented people and a credential is the one thing a demonstration must not invent. The team page says exactly what to ask a real company for.
Which leaves the only test that works on a company you cannot see from the outside: put four specific questions to it about who will do the work and who stands behind it, and listen for whether the answers come back specific. They are set out, in order, on the page about the people here.
The other nine
One argument in ten parts. Each one is a sentence this trade sells and a plainer thing that is true instead.
Send us the document
A photograph is enough to quote from, and you will hear what the problem is — if there is one — before anybody starts work rather than afterwards.