译文栽在认证上，不是栽在措辞上。
译文本身很少是问题。谁签的字、附了什么、原件有没有一起送到，通常才是。
Visatory · · 阅读 4 分钟
本文尚未翻译。下方正文为英文，上方的标题和摘要则不是。
An office sends a transcript to be translated, receives a clean document back, and attaches it to the application. Weeks later it is not accepted. The translation was accurate. What was missing was a statement, a stamp, a credential, or the original alongside it, and none of those are things a translator supplies unless they are asked.
This is one of the cheapest failures in the whole process to prevent and one of the most common, because the requirement lives in the destination's guidance rather than in anything the translator or the student would think to mention.
What is usually being asked for.
Requirements vary, but they are assembled from a small set of components. Knowing the components makes it possible to read any set of guidance quickly.
- A statement from the translator that the translation is complete and accurate.
- The translator's name, signature and contact details, and sometimes their membership of a named professional body.
- The date of translation.
- A copy of the original attached to the translation, so the two can be compared.
- Certification or notarisation by a specified kind of person, which is not the same thing as a translator's statement.
- In some cases, legalisation of the original document itself, which is a separate process again and takes far longer.
The last two are where cases lose weeks. A notarised translation and a legalised original are different requirements addressed to different documents, and an office that conflates them will do the wrong one and discover it late.
Translate the whole document.
Every part of the page, including the parts that look like decoration: the stamps, the seals, the handwritten notes in the margin, the text on the reverse, the grading key printed in small type at the bottom. A translation that silently omits a seal is incomplete, and incomplete is a ground for rejection even when nothing important was left out.
The grading scale deserves particular attention on a transcript. A receiving institution reading a foreign transcript needs to know what the maximum is and what a pass is, and that information is frequently printed in a corner nobody translates.
What the agency should hold.
- The original, or a properly certified copy of it, recorded as which of the two it is.
- The translation, with its statement and credentials attached rather than stored separately.
- A note of who translated it, when, and which requirement the translation was prepared to meet.
- Where legalisation was needed, the date it was started, because that is the step most likely to determine the intake.
Plan it like the appointment it resembles.
Translation and certification have queues attached, and the queues lengthen at exactly the moments an agency needs them most: before the main intake deadlines, and around public holidays. An office that sends documents to be translated in the week they are needed is buying a rush fee at best.
Where legalisation is involved the timescale changes entirely, from days to weeks or longer, and it depends on offices in more than one country. If a case needs it, it is the first thing to start and the thing the plan is built around.
The version that does not exist.
There is one request that comes up in every office and has to be refused. A family asks whether a grade, a course title or a date can be rendered differently in the translation, usually because the original is awkward and the difference sounds small. It is not small. A translation that departs from the original in any respect is a document the agency has helped to alter, and the difference will be visible the moment anyone compares the two, which is precisely what attaching the original invites them to do.
The answer is that the translation says what the document says, and anything that needs explaining is explained separately, in a covering letter that is honest about being one.
The habit that prevents most of this.
Before sending anything to a translator, write down the sentence from the receiver's guidance that describes what is required, and send it to the translator with the document. It takes two minutes and it moves the requirement from somebody's memory into the instruction, which is where it stops being lost.
