Two blank cream sheets overlapping on a linen cloth in hard sunlight, a glass paperweight throwing a star of light across the top corner

When somebody official has to accept it

Sworn and official translation abroad

For countries where the state appoints the translator by name.

Quoted case by case, because the appointed translator sets it.
We read it and quote before starting

Most of continental Europe and much of Latin America does not use the American certificate at all. Instead the state appoints particular people — a traductor jurado in Spain, appointed by the foreign ministry; a traducteur assermenté in France, on a court of appeal's list; a perito traductor in Mexico, authorised by a state court — and only a translation stamped by one of them is official there. This office is not one of them and cannot become one from New York. What we do is find the appointed translator in the destination country, brief them, handle the correspondence and manage the job.

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

Working out what the destination country actually requires, which is frequently not what the customer was told
Finding an appointed translator in that country and confirming their appointment is current
Managing the job, the correspondence and the payment, in one place and one currency
Preparing whatever has to happen at this end first, which is often a notarised copy
Telling you where a plain certified translation from here would have been enough

What this is not

Nobody in this office is a sworn or officially appointed translator of any country, and the certificate we sign is not one
We cannot make a foreign appointment happen faster than that country's translator works
Where a country's rules have changed since somebody told you what they were, the rules win

What it costs

Quoted case by case, because the appointed translator sets it.

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