Document Translation in Nashua, New Hampshire

What arrives, and what makes each one awkward

Spanish is the language most often needed, from households with roots across the Caribbean and Latin America. The specific complication in this part of New England is not the Spanish itself but what is stapled to it. A civil record sent from abroad for an official American purpose usually arrives with an apostille, the standardised certificate that confirms the signature and seal on the underlying document under the Hague Convention. The apostille is a separate page, it is frequently printed in the issuing country's language, and it has to be translated too. People routinely translate the birth certificate, leave the apostille untouched because it looks like administrative wrapping, and then find that the submission is incomplete.

Portuguese here means Brazilian Portuguese, and Brazilian civil documents work on a logic that surprises Americans. Records are held by a cartório, a private notarial registry office, which issues a freshly printed certified copy each time one is requested. The certidão de nascimento in your hand may therefore be dated last month while recording a birth in 1974, and an English version that reports only the printing date has misread the document. Brazilian records also carry identifier numbers, the CPF and the RG, which sit in fixed formats that must be copied exactly rather than reformatted to look tidy. And the orthography has its own traps: the tilde over nasal vowels and the cedilla under the c are letters, not accents, so a name stripped of them is a different name.

French comes in from two directions at once. There is the modern kind, from francophone arrivals and from business with Quebec, and then there is the genealogical kind, which is particular to New England mill cities. Families whose great-grandparents came down from Quebec to work the looms hold baptism, marriage and burial entries written in French in parish registers, in nineteenth-century handwriting, with abbreviations and Latin formulae mixed in. Those documents are read today mostly for estate matters and citizenship-by-descent applications, and the hard part is less the translation than the transcription: deciding what the hand actually wrote before deciding what it means.

Around the edges there is everything an engineering town collects. Greek and Polish records from the older mill generations still surface when an estate is settled. Transcripts and degree certificates arrive from India, China and eastern Europe with grading scales that mean nothing until the table headings are translated correctly. And a good deal of traffic runs outbound, since a company here that hires or sells abroad has contracts, specifications and handbooks that need to leave in the other language.