Usually needs a certificate of accuracy
Court judgment or pleading
The longest thing on this list, and the one where a sentence has to survive an argument.
Usually about twelve pages — an estimate, not a count
Legal documents
Contract or agreement
Priced by the word, because a contract is prose rather than a form.
The ordinary part
Who asks for a contract or agreement, and what we need from you
Two questions, answered the same way every time, and they are the two that decide whether the job can start today or has to wait for a second photograph.
Who asks for it
A supplier, a distributor, a lease, an employment agreement, a shareholders' agreement.
A description of what offices have usually wanted, which is a different thing from a rule. Nobody here is in a position to say what your own matter requires, and the page explaining why is on this site.
What to send
The signed version, with the schedules, and any earlier draft you are comparing it against.
The part people find out late
What goes wrong with a contract or agreement
Everything above this is the ordinary business of a translation office and could be written about almost any document in the catalogue. This paragraph could not, and it is the reason this is a page rather than a row in a list.
Boilerplate is where the money is. Force majeure, governing law, the arbitration clause and the notice provisions are the parts nobody reads and the parts that decide what happens when something goes wrong, and they are written in a legal tradition that may have no counterpart here. Those clauses get the original term in brackets, every time.
That is the whole of it. If it describes what you are holding, it is worth knowing before the work is paid for rather than afterwards; if it does not, nothing else on this page changes. Either way it is not a thing anybody can settle from a description, which is why a quote follows a reading and an estimate does not.
Length and certification
How long it usually is, and what usually goes with it
Both of these are descriptions rather than rules, and the first of them is a guess: most run to about twenty pages, but that is a figure to plan around and not a figure to pay from.
Length
A page on this rate card is 250 words rather than a sheet of paper, so a dense sheet can be two pages and a sparse one can be half of one. That is why the figure above is written as a guess and why nothing is priced from it.
- The estimator counts from the number you give it, never from the figure above
- A quote follows somebody reading the document, and it is the one to rely on
- Stamps, seals, marginal notes and anything handwritten are part of the length
Certification
Not usually certified — it depends who is reading it.
- Everything we do — which service this kind of file usually goes to
- Certified translation — if the office asking for it wants one after all
- The whole rate card — priced by the word rather than the page
About the cheaper option. We use machine translation on some work, we say so, and we charge about half for it. What it cannot do is sign a certificate of accuracy, because that is a person taking responsibility. Which work falls on which side of that line is on its own page.
An estimate and a quote are different objects. An estimate is arithmetic on what you typed. It is not an offer, it does not bind anybody, and it will move if the document turns out to be longer, in worse condition or a different thing from what it was described as. The quote that follows somebody reading it is the one to rely on.
Other legal documents
Same group, same reader at the other end, and each one has a paragraph like the one above.
Send us the document
A photograph of every page of a contract or agreement is enough to quote from, and it is quicker than describing what you are holding.