Who Can Certify A Translation?

Because my translations of patent applications and other technical and legal documents may be used in court, either for litigation purposes or to file an English version of a patent application that has been originally filed in Japanese, German, French, Russian, Czech or another language, I am sometime asked to sign a “Certification of Translation”.

This is the text I use:

I, [my name]

of [my address]  

declare that I am well acquainted with both the Japanese and English languages, as well as a member in good standing of the American Translators Association and National Capital Area Translators Association, and that the document listed below has been accurately translated, to the best of my knowledge and ability: [identification of the document].

Over the years I tried various versions of this certification, mentioning the number of years that I have been working as a patent translator (in two weeks it will be the 27th year) and the fact that I have a master’s degree in Japanese studies, but then I decided to use the short version above.

Sometime I am asked by a translation agency to sign their version of such a certification, and sometime a patent law firm asks me at a later date to sign a certification of my translation based on a model of such a certification provided by another translator or translation agency.

I find these samples useful because this is how I find out about my competition, both among translators and among translation agencies.

Based on the samples of certifications supplied to me by my clients, I happen to know that in many cases, the certification is signed by a monolingual project manager on behalf of the agency.

A sample of a typical project manager’s certification is below:

This is to certify that the attached translation is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, a true and accurate translation from (source language) into (target language) of (identification of the document).

            (Name and signature of the project manager)

The certification does not say anything about the qualifications of the project manager to sign such a translation. And there is a good reason for that: the project manager generally has none, other than being able to read and write English. The average salary of a project manager in a translation agency is 38 thousand dollars, and people who have a college degree, are fluent in a language like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or even German and French, would be crazy to work for a translation agency for that kind of money.

They may start out by working as a project manager for a translation agency for a low salary, but they would generally do something like that only to get their feet wet once they have graduated from college and within a few months they often quit the agency and start their own business, either as a translator, as a translation agency, or as a translator/translation agency hybrid.

It could be said that the project manager is not really lying in the statement above. The monolingual PM probably really does believe that the translation is true and accurate. But if he is monolingual, or just “has some French”, he has no way of ascertaining whether this is really true if the original document was in Japanese or German. This is also a good example demonstrating that the famous “four-eyes principle” makes sense only when both sets of eyes are equally qualified to determine that a translation is accurate, which almost never happens.

But at the same time, although the statement is not really a lie, it is an extremely unethical statement to make, bordering on an outright lie.

If somebody asked me to certify the provenance of a violin that might or might not have been made two hundred years ago by Stradivari, and I issued a signed statement certifying that “to the best of my knowledge, the present violin was made by Antonio Stradivari”, given that I have no way of ascertaining the provenance of the violin, would I be just extremely unethical, or would I be lying?

Nobody is crazy enough to ask somebody like me, who has no relevant knowledge, to make such a statement, of course. But monolingual PMs are signing “Translation Certifications” without really having any idea at all about what is in the original document every day.

And there is a reason for this. Some translation agencies, a small minority of them, which some translators call “honest agencies” in their online discussions, do ask the translator to sign the certifying statement, because the translator is in fact the only person who can do such a thing.

But the problem is, once the translator’s name is identified, what is to stop the client of the agency, for example a law firm, from running a search with the name of the translator and contacting him or her directly? Nothing, of course, especially if the law firm perceives that little or no value is added to the translation by the agency, which is often (but not always) the case, and the translator’s website can be easily found by running a web search, which is also often the case.

Nothing, of course. If the clients believe that the agency adds no further value to the translation, the chances that they will contact the translator directly are very good.

Sometime a translation agency asks me to sign a certifying statement, which I then scan and either add on the first page of my translation, or which is then printed on the agency’s stationary. But only a translation agency that is confident that the clients will not start working directly with the translator is likely to do that.

Most of them simply ask a PM to sign a statement which is either a bold faced lie, a strategic deception, or at least not exactly a true statement.