The cut edge of a thick block of paper seen from the side, clamped into a dark binder, the sheets reading as a stack of fine lines rather than as a page

When the translation has to do a job

Legal translation

Contracts, pleadings, evidence and corporate records.

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

The difficulty in legal translation is almost never vocabulary; it is that two legal systems have different furniture. A concept with no counterpart cannot be translated into one, and the choice is between a literal rendering that reads oddly and a familiar word that quietly asserts something untrue. We take the first, every time, with the original term in brackets, and a translator's note where the difference matters.

Where our answers stop. Nothing on this site is legal or immigration advice and nobody here may give you any. We can describe what a document is and what offices have usually asked for; we cannot tell you what to file, what your case needs, or what a document means for you.

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

Terminology fixed before the work starts and held across the whole file
The original term in brackets wherever an English word would import a concept that is not there
Formatting that preserves clause numbering, cross-references and defined terms
A second translator reading it before delivery, on request and priced by the word
Delivery in the format you sent, so a redline still works

What this is not

Nobody here practises law and nothing we deliver is a legal opinion or advice on what a document means
We do not advise on which jurisdiction's law applies or on what a clause would be held to mean
A translation is not evidence of the truth of what a document says

What it costs

By the word, at the legal rate.

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

Priced above general prose because a clause that reads two ways has to be found before it is delivered, not after it is argued about.

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.