What we will not promise
We cannot translate what we cannot read
A word nobody can read is marked unreadable in the place where it sits. It is never guessed and never invented.
What you will see advertised
“Send whatever you have and we will fill in the rest.”
It sounds like service. What it describes is invention, and on a document somebody official has to compare against an original it is close to the worst thing that could be done to you.
What happens to a word nobody can read
A word that cannot be read is marked as unreadable, in the place where it sits, on the translation. It is not guessed from context, and a company that tells you it will reconstruct a faded stamp is telling you it will invent one.
It is marked, in the place where it sits, as unreadable. That is not a failure of the translation — it is the translation telling the truth about the document, which is the only thing the certificate attached to it actually asserts.
Why a translation with no holes in it should worry an official
Most of what arrives here is harder to read than people expect, and most of it turns out to be readable anyway. It is worth being precise about which part is not.
Half of what comes across this counter is a photograph of a document taken on a telephone at an angle, and a surprising amount of it is a handwritten register entry from the 1950s in a hand nobody writes any more. Most of that is readable with effort. What is not readable is a seal that has been photographed at forty-five degrees, a carbon copy that has faded to nothing, and a page that was cut off. In a certified translation those gaps are the honest part: an officer comparing the two documents can see exactly what was and was not on the original, and a translation with no gaps in it when the original has holes is the one that should worry them.
What to do before you send it
Photograph it flat, in daylight, square-on, with the whole sheet in the frame and the reverse as well. We will tell you what cannot be read before we start, and where it is something that matters we will tell you to go back for a fresh copy rather than sell you a translation with a hole in the middle of it.
There is a whole page about photographing a document, and following it is the difference between a translation that starts the next working day and one that waits while you go back to an office for a fresh copy.
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.