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Civic TranslationSan Francisco, CA

Languages

Any language your program is required to publish in.


Send us the language list your department works to and the quote prices every language on it, with a delivery date against each. Every job is assigned a qualified translator and a second, independent reviewer in that language pair, confirmed before we quote.

Constant

What does not change with the language.

A first job in a pair we have not run before is the same job, on the same terms.

Who does the work
A qualified translator in the pair, and a second linguist who reviews the full text against the source. Never the same person twice.
The quote
Returned same business day, itemized by document and language, with a delivery date against each.
Turnaround
Standard is 2 business days; priority is 24 hours. Dates in the quote are already staffed. If a pair cannot hold your date, the quote says so.
Certificate of accuracy
Signed and dated with every delivery, one per source document per language pair, at no additional charge.
The file
Returned in the format you sent, with the layout rebuilt for the translated text.

Before we translate

The decisions come first.

Some choices must be settled before drafting because editing cannot fix them afterward.

Script and variant

Traditional or Simplified Chinese is a decision about which readers a document is for. Arabic is Modern Standard for anything of record. Spanish is held regionally neutral for a California audience rather than set to one country.

Register

An official notice and a community flyer are not written the same way in any of these languages, and in Korean the difference is carried in the ending of every sentence. We set the level per document type and hold it across the set.

Layout

Text expansion, right-to-left rebuilds, and CJK line breaking are production problems that surface after approval, in the exported file. We lay out to the translated text rather than fitting it to the source.

Terminology

Program and benefit names are unsettled in several of these languages. We build a glossary from what your office has already published, agree it before drafting, and keep it so your next document matches this one.

Tell us the languages and the date.

Send the document with the language list and the deadline. The quote comes back same business day, itemized by document and language, with a delivery date against each one.