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How Your Translation Is Produced

A certified translation is only worth the process behind it. Every order passes through the same stages — assignment to a professional human translator, translation, a separate quality check by our team, and then your own review — and you can watch it move through them from your order page.

The stages, in order

These are the stages your order actually moves through, and the same names you will see on your order page:

• New — we have your order. A team member reviews the details and assigns it to the appropriate translator.
• Assigned — a translator qualified in your language pair and document type has it.
• In Progress — the document is being translated by that person.
• Quality Check — our team performs a final review for accuracy and formatting before anything is sent to you. This is a separate pair of eyes, and a separate stage.
• Awaits Approval — the translation is released to you. You can download it, approve it, or request changes.
• Revision — if you asked for changes, it comes back to us and an updated version follows.
• Completed — approved. Notarization and hard copies, if ordered, are fulfilled at this point.

Human translators, and why the certification requires it

Every certified translation is produced by a professional human translator. That is not a marketing preference: the certification asserts that a named, competent person translated the document and stands behind it, and there is nobody to make that assertion about a machine output.

The same reasoning shapes how we translate. A certified translation is literal — word for word, with nothing added, removed or interpreted — because the receiving office needs it to represent the original exactly. Where that produces an awkward English sentence, the awkward sentence is the correct answer. Standard translation is the service for text that needs to read naturally rather than match the source line by line.

What the quality check looks for

Accuracy is the first thing, but it is not the only one. The review also catches the failures that are invisible to a translator working page by page and obvious to an officer looking at a file:

• A name spelled one way on page one and another on page four
• A stamp, a marginal annotation or the reverse of a page left untranslated
• A date rendered ambiguously, or a calendar conversion applied inconsistently
• Layout that has drifted far enough from the original that it cannot be read side by side
• An identifier — a registry number, a national ID — that does not match the source character for character

Translation, then an independent review

Every certified order goes through two people before it reaches you: a professional translator who translates it, and a second person who reviews it against the original at the Quality Check stage. Those are the two stages ISO 17100, the international standard for translation services, sets out: translation, then revision by someone other than the translator.

Revisions, and what happens if something is wrong

Revisions are included, free, for 30 days from delivery, as long as the source material itself has not changed. You request one from your order page and the order returns to us rather than becoming a new purchase.

We have never had a translation rejected by a receiving office. If one ever is, tell us what they said and we will correct it.

Certified vs. standard translation

A certified translation is a word-for-word translation accompanied by a signed statement attesting to its accuracy and completeness. It is what official bodies require: USCIS, courts, universities and government agencies. Certified translations are $24.95 per page, where one sheet of your document is one page, with no word cap.

A standard translation is the same professional human translation without the certificate, for when you only need to understand the content or for internal or informal use. It is billed at the same $24.95 per page with no word cap.

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