What we will not promise
We do not issue the apostille
We prepare it, we lodge it and we bring it back. Issuing it is a government's act.
What you will see advertised
“We will apostille your documents.”
One verb, and it has quietly taken a government's act. It is a small enough slip that most of the companies making it have probably not noticed; the customer who believes it has bought a different object from the one that is going to arrive.
What is actually true
An apostille is issued by a designated government authority — for a New York notarial act, the New York Secretary of State — and by nobody else. What a translation company does is prepare the document, lodge it and bring it back.
Prepare, lodge, track, collect. Those are four real jobs, they are what the handling fee on the rate card pays for, and they take the chasing off somebody who already has enough to think about. None of them is issuing anything.
And what the apostille itself actually says
The distinction matters well beyond pedantry, because the thing being claimed and the thing that arrives in the envelope are not the same object.
This matters beyond pedantry because of what the apostille actually says. It authenticates a signature, the capacity of the person who signed, and the identity of a seal. It says nothing at all about whether the content of the document is true, and it says nothing about the translation. A company that describes itself as issuing apostilles has, in one verb, claimed a government's act — and a customer who believes an apostille certifies accuracy has bought a different thing from the one they will receive.
What we do instead
We say what each step is and whose act it is. The translator signs the certificate. A notary attests the signature. The Secretary of State authenticates the notary. Each of those is a separate person doing a separate thing, and the fee we charge is for getting the document through the sequence — the authority's own fee is passed on at what it costs.
The rate card carries that sequence as its own line, separate from the translation, so you can see what you are buying from us and what is being passed on at cost. The estimator adds the authority's own working days to the date it gives you, because that step is the one that most often decides whether a deadline is met.
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.