Quality
Two qualified linguists on every job.
One translates. A second, qualified in the same pair, checks the whole translation against the whole source before anything leaves.
The rule
One translates. A second checks.
The reviewer is never the translator. Both linguists are qualified in the specific pair, working into the language they know best. The review is a comparison against the source.
- Native or near-native command of the target language, in the regional variety the audience reads.
- Demonstrated work in public-sector, legal, or health and benefits material.
- A sample translation and a sample review, before any paid assignment.
- References, contacted, and a signed confidentiality agreement.
If your file needs to record who worked on a document, ask; we will state the pair, the qualification basis, and each linguist’s role in writing.
Error classes
What the second linguist looks for.
- Omission
- A dropped sentence, a skipped bullet, a footnote left in a table, a second page of a scan nobody noticed.
- Numbers, dates, and names
- Transposed digits, a date order the target locale reads differently, a misspelled street, program, or office name.
- Register drift
- A notice rendered above the reading level of the statute it came from, or an instrument rendered too casually to be taken seriously.
- False friends and near-equivalents
- A legal term whose closest-sounding counterpart in the target language names a different thing.
- Terminology inconsistency
- The same benefit, form, office, or deadline named two ways inside one document.
- Encoding and diacritic loss
- Accents and tone marks stripped or substituted in the PDF, print stream, or CMS, which frequently produces a different word.
- Truncation and layout damage
- Text expansion pushing a line out of a fixed field, table cell, or button, checked at production size.
- Untranslated remnants
- Source-language text left in headers, footers, alt text, and form labels.
Terminology is managed per client: a glossary holds your approved terms and the ones we proposed and you accepted, and every later job for that program is prepared against it. It is yours in a portable format at any point.
Certification
What the certificate attests to.
- That the attached translation is a true, complete, and accurate rendering of the identified source document, to the best of the signer’s knowledge and ability.
- That a linguist qualified to translate between the two languages reviewed the translation.
- The document, the language pair, the page count, the date, and a reference number tying it to our record of the job.
- Notarization and apostille are separate instruments; say so at intake and we will confirm before you order whether we can meet it.
- It makes no determination about regulatory compliance or sufficiency under a specific program requirement. That determination is yours.
- It attests to one document, signed and dated.
If we get something wrong, we fix it.
Send the passage and what you think is wrong. A reviewer reads it against the source. If the translation contains an error, we correct the document and reissue the certificate with the corrected file at no charge. We apply the same review to translations you already hold, including machine output you inherited, as a service in its own right: review of existing translations.
Confidentiality
How your documents are handled.
- Confidential by default. Draft and pre-decisional material is handled as confidential whether or not an agreement says so. Everyone who touches a job signs a confidentiality obligation.
- No public tooling. Confidential material is never pasted into public web tools or sent to a service whose terms take a licence to the content.
- Access by job. A linguist receives the document they are assigned, for as long as the assignment runs.
- Retention with an end. We keep the source, the file, and the certificate to reissue a copy or answer an audit. Ask us to delete a job and we will.
- Used only for your work. Never published as a sample or applied to another client's file.
If your department has a data-handling schedule or security addendum we need to sign, send it to contact@civictranslation.com and we will tell you plainly whether we can meet it.
Send us something to check.
A new document to translate, or a translation you already hold and want read against its source.