What to send us, and how to photograph it

Five rules, and why each of them is on the list

A photograph or a scan is enough to quote from and usually enough to work from. It does not have to be professional. It has to be legible, complete, and the same shape as the document.

Flat. A page held in one hand curls, and a curl throws the last third of every line out of focus. Put the document on a table.

Square on. From directly above rather than at an angle. A seal photographed at forty-five degrees is the commonest thing on this counter that genuinely cannot be read: the impression is a shadow, and the shadow disappears when the paper tilts away from the light.

In daylight. Near a window, in the middle of the day, with the overhead light off. Do not use the flash: it bounces off the shiny half of a stamp and off any laminate, and it leaves a white disc exactly where the important thing was.

The whole sheet. All four corners in the frame, including the margin. What lives in a margin is a reference number, a form number, a note added later, and an office that wants to check the document against its own records wants the number.

And the reverse. Photograph the back of every sheet even when the back looks empty, and especially when it looks empty. This is the rule that saves the most time in this office, and the next section is a list of what is on the back.

The parts people reliably leave out of the frame

None of the omissions below is careless. Each one is a part of a document that does not look like part of the document until somebody tells you what it is.

The reverse of a civil record. A photograph or scan of the whole sheet including every stamp, every marginal note and the reverse — the reverse is where half of them keep the registrar's signature. Half the birth certificates that arrive here arrive without the side that carries the signature that makes them official.

The margins of a French extract. A French civil extract is not a copy of the original entry — it is an extract written out afresh, with the marginal notes that record everything that happened to that person since. Those margins carry the divorce, the change of name and the death, and a translation that omits them because they are in the margin has omitted the point.

The grading key on a transcript. Every page, both sides, plus the grading key — it is usually printed on the back and it is the only thing that makes the numbers mean anything. A table of numbers with no key is a table of numbers, and the evaluator who reads it next needs the key more than the marks.

The stamp that makes a decree final. A decree that has not been made final is not a divorce, and the endorsement that makes it final is frequently a separate stamp on a separate page that nobody photographs. We ask for it every time, because the translation of a non-final decree is a translation of nothing anybody wants.

The second side of a card. Both sides of the card, in focus, with the hologram not blocking the print. On a driving licence the category table is the whole document — what somebody may drive, from when, and under which restriction code — and it is printed on the back.

The stamps in a passport. The data page, and if the stamps matter, every page that has one, in order. The data page alone is enough for identity; the stamps matter only when the travel itself is the point.

The rest of the period. The full period the office asked for, every page, with the running balance visible. A statement missing its first page is a statement missing its opening balance.

The date on a police certificate. The certificate with its issue date visible and any reference number, and tell us the deadline — this is the document where the deadline usually bites. Most of them are only good for a few months from issue, and the clock runs from the date the police wrote it rather than the date it was translated.

Send the set, not the page you were asked about

If a matter has several documents in it, send all of them at once. A translator holding the whole file spells a name the same way on every sheet, and a bundle done in three instalments by three people three weeks apart is a bundle with three spellings of one grandmother in it — precisely the kind of discrepancy an officer comparing documents notices.

Order matters too. The whole file in the order the authority holds it, including the pages that only carry a stamp. Where a court has the exhibits in a particular sequence, keep the sequence: a translation that renumbers a bundle no longer matches the thing it is a translation of.

The exception is the medical file, and it runs the other way. Everything in order, and tell us which part is actually needed — a whole hospital file translated in full is expensive and usually more than anybody asked for.

What happens if part of it cannot be read

A word that cannot be read is marked as unreadable, in the place where it sits. It is not reconstructed from context and it is not filled in from what the rest of the sentence implies. That is not fussiness: in a certified translation the gaps are the honest part, because an officer comparing the two documents can see exactly what was and was not legible on the paper. A translation with no gaps in it when the original has holes in it is the one that ought to worry them.

So when half of something is faded, or the hand is one nobody writes any more, send it anyway and somebody will tell you what can be made out before you commit to anything. A great deal of what looks hopeless is readable with effort. What genuinely is not readable is a seal photographed at an angle, a carbon copy that has faded away and a page that was cut off by the edge of the frame — and two of those three are fixed by photographing it again.

One more thing, before you send anything at all

Check that the document in your hand is the version that was asked for. The commonest expensive mistake here has nothing to do with photography: it is the short-form certificate. An office asking for a birth certificate usually means the long form, the one that names both parents, and a great many countries issue a short form that does not. Getting the wrong one translated costs the translation and the delay and gets you no closer.

If you are not certain which version you are holding, send a photograph and ask. Describing what a document is, and how two versions of it differ, is not advice about your case — it is a description of a piece of paper.