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As a legal and financial translator, my work primarily consists of two
types of documents, long legal texts involving specific terminology and a myriad of forms whose major challenge can be the formatting. Some
examples of these forms are birth, death and marriage certificates, bank and
insurance statements, utility bills and vehicle registrations. Producing a
high-quality template for these forms can involve a significant investment of
time. However, my experience is that this investment pays dividends in the long
term. For this reason, my attitude to requests for document templates from random translators is not quite collegial. In any case, these templates are
vital since they help meet customer expectations and serve as our profit on
these low margin translations.
Standard forms are anything but standard to translate the first time.
First, translators receive them in PDF form, often of poor quality. To the best
of my knowledge, no currently available PDF converter can consistently produce a useable
template. A close examination of many forms shows that the number of columns in
the lines changes at a high frequency, often every other line. Fonts sizes and
colors vary from item to item. The relative length and number of words also differ from
language to language. For example, English are far longer than Hebrew words,
which often forces adjustment of the line parameters. In short, creating an
initial template of a single-page form can require several hours.
The process does not end at that point as the forms change over time.
Governments change the data included in official documents from time to time.
For example, in Israel, marriage certificates before a certain year did not
include a line for the last name of each party after the marriage, apparently
on the assumption that the wife automatically would adopt her husband’s last name.
The same documents issued by different government entities differ slightly, e.g., a birth certificate issued by the Israel Ministry of Foreign
Affairs varies slightly from one issued by the Ministry of Interior. The major
headache is the tendency of municipalities and utility companies to make small and mostly irrelevant
changes to their property tax invoices and other forms, often on the occasion
of the anniversaries of significant dates in the city’s history. While this
does not affect the actual content, these small changes sometimes affect the
formatting. Document translators have to pay careful attention and compare the template to
the original to ensure an exact match.
This effort is essential for a certificate translator. First, just as people
first eat with their eyes, customers first consider at the overall view of the
document. If the formatting attains a high-level match to the original, it
already looks “good”, regardless of the actual terminology used in it. On the
other hand, an excellent translation poorly presented seems substandard. Thus,
while technically secondary, presentation makes a strong impression. I can add
that producing a sharp-looking document gives me a positive feeling too, i.e.,
a job well done. However, the most important reason for investing in a proper
template is that it creastes profit. When a different customer requests a
translation of the same type of certificate, it takes me far less time. Any
losses, based on the difference between time invested and price received,
incurred when producing the template are recouped and more in future uses. Furthermore,
as these documents tend to come in large batches since they are often part of
legal cases, the translator is able to quickly and efficiently take on a large amount of these documents. Thus, document translator should
neither avoid nor regret the time spent creating a proper document template as
the result is fruitful in the long term.
Given that a template is a product of much effort and vital to personal
success, in my opinion, it is not appropriate to issue a general call for
templates. These calls in public translator forums are more or less phrased as
“Does anybody have a template for a ………?”. My initial internal reaction is
“Make one yourself!” but I never write that. For select colleagues with whom I have active cooperation, including mutual referrals, I have
no problem in sharing my template. I view this act as a favor, which I may need
in return sometime in the future. In other words, the sharing is to our mutual
benefit. Yet, on the whole, I tend to consider my templates as my intellectual property. I know
that many translators disagree with that approach and may even call it selfish.
The sharing of templates is clearly not a black-and-white matter.
Thus, any translator buyer wondering why translators charge for
certificates on per-document, not per-word, basis, needs to understand how
time-consuming creating the template can be. The document may be simple to
understand but quite complicated to create. The buyer is paying for the
experience and expertise of the translator just as computer technicians receive
compensation for the years of experience they have, not the time it took to
solve the problem. If someone is willing to freely share these templates, that
person is being generous. In any case, like an elegant plate of food, a proper
template is a beautiful site for translator and customer alike.
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