What we will not promise
Nobody can guarantee that your document will be accepted
A promise about somebody else's decision is not a promise. It is a refund policy wearing one's clothes.
What you will see advertised
“Guaranteed acceptance. 100% accepted, or your money back.”
It is the most reassuring sentence available in this trade, and the reason it reassures is that it appears to remove the one thing the customer is frightened of. Look at whose decision it is describing.
What is actually true
The body you send it to decides, every time, and it decides on grounds that include several things no translator controls. A guarantee of somebody else's decision is not a guarantee. It is a refund policy wearing one's clothes.
Notice too that the advertisement is two offers stapled together, and that only the second of them is anybody's to keep. Which of the two you were relying on is the whole question, and it is not one you get to answer after the letter arrives.
What actually decides whether a filing comes back
It helps to list the things that genuinely get a filing refused, and then to ask how many of them a translator is anywhere near.
A filing is refused for the wrong original, a missing page, an expired certificate, a form completed incorrectly, a fee paid short, or an officer who wanted a different version of a document — and only one item on that list is about the translation at all. When a company promises acceptance, what it can actually do if you are refused is give you your money back, which is worth having and is a different product from the one being advertised. The gap between those two is where the deadline you missed sits.
What we promise instead
We will tell you before you buy which form of certification the body you named usually asks for, and we will tell you when we think you have the wrong document in your hand. If a translation of ours is refused for something that is our doing, we put it right and we do not charge you again. That is a promise about our own work, which is the only kind anybody here is in a position to make.
It is a smaller promise than the one at the top of this page and it is the only one anybody in this trade is in a position to hold. The policies page states it again beside what happens when we are the ones who got something wrong, and the estimator repeats it before it will show you a figure.
The other nine
One argument in ten parts. Each one is a sentence this trade sells and a plainer thing that is true instead.
Send us the document
A photograph is enough to quote from, and you will hear what the problem is — if there is one — before anybody starts work rather than afterwards.