A wooden-handled rubber stamp with a plain unmarked face, an ink pad and a brass embossing press whose plate is blank, standing on a sheet of unmarked paper

When somebody official has to accept it

Notarised translation

A notary public watches the translator sign, and attests who signed.

The page rate plus the notarial fee.
We read it and quote before starting

A notarised translation is a certified translation whose certificate has been signed in front of a notary public commissioned by the State of New York. The notary checks the signer's identification, watches the signature, and completes a notarial certificate recording that. That is the whole of it, and the sentence that matters is the next one: the notary is not reading the translation and is not attesting that it is correct. No notary in this country does that. The reason to buy it is that some consulates, some courts and every apostille require it as the step before theirs.

The decision is not ours to sell. Whether a body accepts a filing is that body's decision, and it turns on several things a translator has no part in. Nobody can honestly guarantee it. What we promise is our own work: anything refused because of something we did is put right at no charge.

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

The certified translation, complete, exactly as above
The translator signing in person before a commissioned notary public
The notarial certificate, with the notary's seal and commission details
The signed original in the post, because a notarised document is a paper object
Advice on whether you actually need it, which is often no

What this is not

The notary does not check the translation, does not read the source language, and attests nothing about accuracy
It is not an apostille and it is not legalisation; it is the step those two are built on
It does not make a translation acceptable to a body that was going to refuse it for another reason

What it costs

The page rate plus the notarial fee.

Certified work is priced by the page rather than by the sheet, which is why two documents of the same physical size are quoted differently — the caption under the table gives the count. The group your language falls into is the only other thing that moves the figure, and the table says why each group costs what it does rather than asking you to take it on trust.

Certified translation, by the page. A page is 250 words rather than a sheet of paper, and small jobs meet the $60 minimum.
Group	Why it costs what it does	A page
Group one	The largest pools of translators in this city, and the pairs we can usually staff the same morning.	$32
Group two	A working panel rather than a queue of candidates — a day or two of notice makes a difference to who takes it.	$38
Group three	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.	$46

And the act that is not translation

Two tables, because two different things are being bought. The first is the translation, priced by the page. The second is the acts that go around it — and what is charged there is for getting a document through the sequence, with an authority’s own fee passed on at what it costs rather than marked up.

The acts that are not translation. Three of these are somebody else’s act that we prepare and lodge, and the column beside each one says whose.
Item	What it is	Fee
Certificate of accuracy	The signed statement that goes with every certified translation: who translated it, that they are competent in both languages, and that the translation is complete and accurate. It is included in the page rate and never charged for separately, because a certified translation without it is not one.	Included
Notarised signature	A notary public commissioned by the State of New York watches the translator sign the certificate, checks their identification, and completes a notarial certificate. What the notary attests is who signed. No notary in this country attests that a translation is correct.	$25
Apostille handling	Preparing the notarised document for authentication, lodging it with the authority, tracking it and getting it back to you. The apostille itself is issued by a Secretary of State under the Hague Convention and by nobody else. The authority's own fee is passed on at what it costs.	$95
Signed hard copy, posted	The signed and sealed original in the post, first class. Most filings take a PDF now and the PDF is included in the price; some consulates still want paper and will say so.	$15
Each further hard copy	Signed and sealed the same as the first. Worth ordering one more than you think you need: an office that keeps your copy does not give it back.	$10
Overnight courier	Tracked, next working day, where the post is not fast enough for a deadline.	$28

The whole rate card · Estimate this job

Straight talk

Where this is bounded

These straight answers bear directly on the work above: The notary is not checking the translation and Nobody can guarantee that your document will be accepted. The rest of the ten are below — they are one argument in ten parts and each links to the others.