37-32 61st Street, Woodside, NY 11377
Reading
Six questions people ask at this counter every week, answered at more length than anybody has time for while somebody is waiting behind them.
Every one of them is a question that decides what somebody spends, or how long they wait, or whether the thing they buy is the thing that was asked of them. None of them is answerable in the thirty seconds a queue allows, and all of them are answerable.
They are not sales pages. Two of them argue for spending less than you were about to, and one of them is a translation company explaining where the cheaper machine is the right tool for the job.
four minute read
A page in this trade is two hundred and fifty words, not a sheet of paper. Which is why a one-sheet birth certificate is one page and a one-sheet court order can be three, and how to count yours before you ask anybody for a price.
five minute read
Flat, square-on, daylight, whole sheet, and the reverse. Five rules that decide whether your translation is ready in two days or in two weeks, plus the parts of a document people reliably leave out of the frame.
seven minute read
Why an American certificate, a Spanish jurado stamp and a notary's seal are three unrelated objects that everybody calls the same thing, and how to work out which one the office writing to you actually means.
six minute read
The prose is rarely the problem. Two surnames, a patronymic, a declined ending, a decimal comma and a date written the other way round are where a document actually goes wrong, and each of them is a decision somebody has to sign for.
six minute read
A translation company saying where the cheaper option wins. Understanding a document that arrived, triaging a long file, internal drafts, repetitive technical text — and the four places where it costs more than starting clean.
four minute read
Roughly two thousand words a day per translator, plus a day for the reading, plus whatever an authority takes — which is the part nobody can compress. What rush pricing buys and what it cannot.
The reading above explains how this trade works. There is a second set of pages that says what this office will not claim, one page for each claim, each of them printing the advertisement it exists to refuse.
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.
A photograph is enough to quote from. Or work out the figure yourself first — the estimator shows its arithmetic rather than only its answer.