What happens next
How a job runs
What happens between sending us a document and getting it back, step by step, including the step that is not ours and cannot be hurried.
From the photograph on your telephone to the envelope
Five steps, and the reason they are published is that the commonest question after price is what actually happens next.
Most of what this office does never requires anybody to come in. A document arrives as a photograph or a scan, somebody reads it, you are told a figure and a date, the work is done and checked, and it comes back as a PDF the day it is finished with paper in the post if you asked for paper. That is the whole of it, and the detail below is what happens inside each of those.
It is worth reading once rather than skipping, because a customer who knows the sequence can see which step their own case is going to be difficult at — and every one of the difficult ones is easier to deal with at the beginning than in the last week before a deadline.
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You send it, or bring it in
A photograph or a scan is enough to quote and usually enough to work from. The whole sheet, flat, in daylight, including the reverse and every stamp. If it is a set, send the set.
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We read it and quote before starting
Somebody reads the actual document rather than guessing from its name, counts it, and sends you a figure and a date. If there is a problem — the wrong version, a page missing, something unreadable — that is when you hear about it, not afterwards.
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It is translated, then read again
By a person, in the pair, against the source. Every certified document is read a second time before the certificate is signed, and that second reading is included rather than sold as an extra.
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Certified, and notarised if it needs to be
The certificate is signed by the translator who did the work. Where the receiving body needs a notarial signature or an apostille, that is arranged from here and tracked from here, and we tell you the realistic date rather than the hopeful one.
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It reaches you, and we keep a copy
A PDF the day it is finished, and paper in the post where you asked for it. We keep the file so that a further copy later costs a copy rather than a job, and so the terminology matches if you come back with the next document in the same matter.
Where the time actually goes
Translation is the predictable half. The part that decides whether a deadline is met is usually somebody else's desk.
What a working day is. Working days, starting the working day after we have a legible copy of everything. Public holidays are not working days and neither is the Saturday morning the counter is open.
How the days are counted. Working days, starting the working day after we have a legible copy of everything. Where an authority is involved, its own time is added and is not ours to compress — that step is the one that most often decides whether a deadline is met.
The clock starts when we have a legible copy of everything rather than when you first write to us, and that is not a technicality — a page missing from a set, or a stamp photographed at an angle nobody can read, stops the count until it is replaced. Send the whole thing, including the reverse of every sheet, and the first date you are given is usually the date you get.
Where an authority is involved the arithmetic changes shape. Its own time is added to ours and it cannot be compressed by paying anybody more, which is why an apostille is quoted with the authority's step in the total number of days and why a rush surcharge is applied to the translation and to nothing else.
What a figure on this site is
Two standing notes, because the difference between them is the one thing worth being pedantic about before any money changes hands.
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.
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.
In practice the two differ for one reason far more often than any other: a document had more words on it than a photograph of it suggested. That is exactly what step two exists to find, and it is why you hear about it before a translator starts rather than on the invoice.
Anything refused or returned because of something we did is put right at no charge and at the front of the queue. That is a promise about our own work, which is the only kind anybody in this trade is in a position to make — whether an agency, a court or a consulate accepts a filing is that body's decision and nobody can sell you a guarantee of it.
Send the document, or work out the figure first
A photograph of the whole sheet is enough to quote from. If you would rather see the arithmetic before you send anything, the estimator shows every line of it.