A single sheet of heavy blank paper on a dark wooden table, a smooth embossed ring pressed into it with nothing inside the ring, and the nib of a fountain pen at the edge of the frame

When somebody official has to accept it

Certified translation

A complete translation with a signed certificate of accuracy attached to it.

By the page, from the rate card.
We read it and quote before starting

This is the core of the office and it is a narrower thing than most people expect. A certified translation is a complete rendering of everything on the document — text, stamps, seals, marginal notes, the illegible parts marked as illegible — with a signed statement naming the translator, saying they are competent in both languages, and saying the translation is complete and accurate. In this country the certificate is what makes it certified. It is not a licence and there is no register; there is a person putting their name to a claim that can be tested.

What a certificate covers. A certified translation says something about the translation and nothing whatever about the original. We do not verify that a document is genuine, and no certificate, notarial act or apostille from anybody does either — an apostille authenticates a signature and a seal.

The two lists

What you are buying, and what you are not

The second column is the more useful of the two. Most of what goes wrong in this trade is somebody paying for a thing they believed they were getting and were never told they were not.

What this includes

Everything on the page, including what is handwritten, stamped, embossed or crossed out
A layout that follows the original closely enough that an officer can hold them side by side
Anything unreadable marked as unreadable, in the place where it sits, rather than guessed
A translator's note wherever a term has no English equivalent, with the original in brackets
The signed certificate of accuracy, included in the page rate and never billed separately
A PDF the same working day it is finished, and a signed hard copy if you want one

What this is not

It is not a guarantee that the body you send it to will accept it — nobody can sell you that, and the page saying so is on this site
It does not certify that the ORIGINAL is genuine; nothing we do says anything about the document you gave us
It is not a credential evaluation, a legal opinion, or advice about which document you should have filed

What it costs

By the page, from the rate card.

Certified work is priced by the page rather than by the sheet, which is why two documents of the same physical size are quoted differently — the caption under the table gives the count. The group your language falls into is the only other thing that moves the figure, and the table says why each group costs what it does rather than asking you to take it on trust.

Certified translation, by the page. A page is 250 words rather than a sheet of paper, and small jobs meet the $60 minimum.
Group	Why it costs what it does	A page
Group one	The largest pools of translators in this city, and the pairs we can usually staff the same morning.	$32
Group two	A working panel rather than a queue of candidates — a day or two of notice makes a difference to who takes it.	$38
Group three	A handful of people we trust in the pair, most of them working somewhere else at the time. The rate is what it costs to reach them, not a judgement about the language.	$46