A long sheet of pale green paper folded into a concertina on dark slate, a brass ruler lying along the foot of the folds

When the translation has to do a job

Financial and corporate translation

Statements, audit reports, tender documents and board papers.

By the word, at the financial rate.
We read it and quote before starting

The vocabulary of accounting is stable and the numbers are where the danger is. Most of Europe writes the decimal separator as a comma and the thousands separator as a full stop, which is the American convention exactly reversed, and a figure read the wrong way round is out by a factor of a thousand in a document about money. Every figure is converted, and the fact that it has been converted is stated on the translation.

Where the figures come from. Every figure on this site comes from the rate card, and the estimator shows its arithmetic rather than only its answer. What it cannot know is how many words are actually on your document, which is why a quote follows a reading and an estimate does not.

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

Number and date formats converted to the American convention, with the conversion stated
Accounting terms rendered against the standard the document was prepared under, named on the translation
Tables rebuilt as tables rather than flattened into prose
Currency left as the currency it is, never converted, because an exchange rate is a date
Consistency across a set of documents that were written by different people

What this is not

Nobody here is an accountant or an auditor and nothing delivered is an opinion on the accounts
We do not convert currency, restate figures under a different standard, or reconcile anything
A translated statement proves what the original said and nothing about whether it was right

What it costs

By the word, at the financial rate.

This is quoted by the word before anything starts. The row below is Financial and corporate, and the column is whichever of the three groups your language sits in — the same three groups the certified page rate uses.

Number formats are the trap rather than the vocabulary: a decimal comma read as a thousands separator is a factor of a thousand.

Work quoted by the word, by discipline and by language group. A second translator reading it before delivery is 8 cents a word on top, and it is included rather than extra on anything certified.
The work	Group one	Group two	Group three
Legal Contracts, filings, pleadings, evidence, corporate records.	24 cents a word	29 cents a word	35 cents a word
Medical and clinical Records, discharge summaries, consent forms, study documents.	26 cents a word	31 cents a word	37 cents a word
Financial and corporate Statements, audit reports, tender documents, board papers.	22 cents a word	27 cents a word	33 cents a word
Technical Manuals, specifications, safety documentation, drawings.	22 cents a word	26 cents a word	32 cents a word
Marketing and website Campaigns, landing pages, product copy, brand material.	32 cents a word	38 cents a word	45 cents a word
Machine translation with human review Machine output, read end to end and corrected by a translator.	11 cents a word	14 cents a word	17 cents a word

The whole rate card · Estimate this job

Straight talk

Where this is bounded

This straight answer bears directly on the work above: We do not give legal or immigration advice. The rest of the ten are below — they are one argument in ten parts and each links to the others.