Coverage
Languages we cover
Twenty-four languages with a standing panel, priced in three groups — and seven more that come through this office in real matters and cannot be staffed from a panel by anybody in this city.
A standing panel means something narrower than a list of languages on a website. It means there are people in this pair we have worked with, whose work has been read, and whose name can go on a certificate of accuracy — so that when somebody walks in with a record late on a Thursday there is somebody to send it to rather than somebody to look for.
That is what the twenty-four languages below have. What decides which group a language sits in, and therefore what a page of it costs, is the size of the pool of people in this city who can do the work and sign for it. Nothing else — not the script, not the difficulty, not how far away the country is.
Each language has a page, and each page is mostly about one thing: the decision a translator has to take in that language that has no right answer to look up. It is different in every one of them, and it is the reason these are separate pages rather than one page with a list of names on it.
Why the rate moves
Three groups, and the group is about people rather than about the language
The page rate is the same for every language in a group. Where a language sits is a fact about who is available in this city to translate it and put their name to it, which is why the reason is printed beside the figure rather than left as a shrug.
| Group | Page rate | Languages in it |
|---|---|---|
| Group one | $32 a page | five languages |
| Group two | $38 a page | twelve languages |
| Group three | $46 a page | seven languages |
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.
Group one $32 a page
The largest pools of translators in this city, and the pairs we can usually staff the same morning.
Français · group one · Latin script
French
France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and much of West and Central Africa
Deutsch · group one · Latin script
German
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, eastern Belgium
Group two $38 a page
A working panel rather than a queue of candidates — a day or two of notice makes a difference to who takes it.
Nederlands · group two · Latin script
Dutch
The Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean
Magyar · group two · Latin script
Hungarian
Hungary, and Hungarian-speaking communities in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia
Hrvatski · group two · Latin script
Croatian
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatian communities across the region
Kreyòl Ayisyen · group two · Latin script
Haitian Creole
Haiti, and the Haitian communities of New York, Florida and Montreal
Group three $46 a page
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.
The other half of the answer
The languages we arrange, and cannot staff
A coverage page normally stops at the list above, and stopping there is what makes it read as complete. These seven are the languages this office genuinely meets and genuinely has no panel for.
Twenty-four languages above have somebody whose name could go on the certificate. The seven named beside this paragraph do not — not here and, as far as this office has ever been able to find, not anywhere in this city.
They are not a footnote to the catalogue. They arrive with the matters that are hardest to be late for, and the temptation on a page like this is to leave them off the site entirely so that the coverage claim stays tidy. Leaving them off would also mean nobody could find out what actually happens when one of them walks in.
So the card says what actually happens, including how long it takes and that it sometimes takes longer. That is a worse sentence to read than a name on a list, and it is the true one.
Languages we arrange rather than staff
- Quechua
- Guaraní
- K'iche'
- Mam
- Nahuatl
- Mixtec
- Q'eqchi'
These come through this office in real matters — an asylum interview, a hearing, a school meeting — and there is no panel for any of them, here or anywhere in this city. What we do is find somebody through the community organisations that already work with these speakers, which takes about a week and sometimes longer, and we tell you that before you rely on it rather than after. What we will not do is put up a page implying a translator is sitting here waiting, because a family with a hearing date deserves the real timescale.
Written translation is a separate problem again: several of these languages have no settled written standard and a document in one is rare. Most of what is needed is interpreting.
About these pages
Why every language page shows the same photograph
Deliberately, and it is worth saying rather than leaving somebody to wonder whether the build ran out of pictures.
A photograph that told one of these languages apart from another would have to be a flag, a writing system or a place. This site prints none of the three: a flag is the mark of a state and belongs to that state, a page of script is a picture of words nobody here wrote, and a photograph of a country is a photograph of somewhere none of this work happens.
What the header shows instead is paper, which is what actually crosses this counter, and it is the same picture on every one of these pages because the work is the same work.
About the photographs. Every photograph on this site was generated. No real person appears anywhere on it, and no image shows a real document: everything that looks like a certificate, a stamp or a register entry is invented, unreadable at any size, and belongs to nobody. There is a page about how they were made and why that decision was taken.
- Get an estimate — arithmetic on what you type, shown line by line
- The whole rate card — every figure on this site comes from it
- All document types — what usually arrives, and what each one needs
Your language is on the list. What now?
Send a photograph of the document. The estimator will give you a figure first if you would rather work it out yourself.