What we will not promise
We do not give legal or immigration advice
We can describe what a document is. What your case needs is a question for somebody who is advising you.
What you will see advertised
“Tell us your situation and we will tell you what to file.”
It is offered kindly, usually by somebody who genuinely wants to help, and that is exactly what makes it the most dangerous sentence on this list.
Where our answers stop
Which documents your case requires, what they mean and what to do next is legal advice. It is not something a translation company may give you, and it is not something anybody here is in a position to know.
This is not modesty and it is not a disclaimer bolted to the bottom of a page. Nobody at this counter has seen your file, knows what has already been filed in your name, or is qualified to reason about either.
Why being helpful is how this line gets crossed
The failure does not look like a company overreaching. It looks like a reasonable question getting a reasonable-sounding answer, from somebody standing behind a counter being kind.
This is the boundary most easily crossed by being helpful. A customer at the counter with a folder asks a reasonable question, and the reasonable-sounding answer — “you will want the long form and you will need it apostilled” — is a statement about their case. It may be wrong for them. In immigration matters the cost of following confident bad advice is measured in years, and the people most likely to accept it are the ones with nobody else to ask, which is exactly who comes to a translation counter.
What is genuinely useful, and is not advice
There is a real and useful thing that is not advice, and it is most of what we do at that counter: telling you what other people in your position have usually been asked for, what the difference between two versions of a document is, and which questions to put to your attorney or to the office that wrote to you. Description, not direction. Where somebody genuinely has nobody to ask, the honest answer is a referral to a legal service that does this for nothing, not a guess from us.
The test is simple enough to apply while you are still standing at the counter. Do you leave with a better question for the person who is actually advising you, or with an answer from somebody who is not?
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.