Document Translation in St. Louis, Missouri

The largest Bosnian community outside Europe files its paperwork here

Families arriving from Bosnia and Herzegovina during and after the war of the 1990s settled in south St. Louis in numbers that have no parallel anywhere else outside the region itself, concentrated around Bevo Mill and spreading into the southern suburbs. Three decades on, the documents that community needs translated are no longer only asylum papers. They are pension records, property titles, inheritance files, school certificates for children born here who are claiming citizenship there, and register extracts requested from a municipality thousands of miles away.

Bosnian is written in the Latin alphabet, which lulls people into thinking there is nothing technical to worry about. There is. The alphabet carries č, ć, ž, š and đ, and American systems that accept only unaccented letters flatten them: Đurić comes out as Djuric in one database and Duric in another, and now one person has two identities. The distinction between č and ć is not cosmetic either, since the two letters stand for different sounds and appear in different surnames. Dates are another quiet trap, written day first with a full stop after every element including the year, so a date that ends in a stray period is correctly formed rather than mistyped.

Provenance is the third issue and the one that causes the most back and forth. A document issued before 1992 was produced by Yugoslav authorities under an emblem and a state name that no longer exist, and may be printed in Cyrillic as well as Latin, because both scripts were in official use. A document issued after the war comes from one of the two entities into which the country is now divided, so the authority named on it depends on where the person's register entry happens to sit. All of this belongs in the translated version exactly as it appears. An American reviewer comparing two records for the same person needs to see why the issuing bodies are different, not have the difference smoothed away.

Spanish and Vietnamese round out the picture, along with more recent arrivals from Afghanistan and the Middle East. Spanish records bring a false friend worth naming: a notario in Latin America is a trained lawyer with authority to draw up binding instruments, while an American notary public witnesses signatures and nothing more. Translating the word across without comment overstates what an American notary did and understates what a Latin American one did. Vietnamese families often hold a household registration book, a civil document with no American equivalent at all, and describing what it is matters more than finding an English label for it.

A French trading post that became the gateway west

Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau founded the settlement in 1764 as a fur-trading post on the west bank of the Mississippi, a little downstream of the point where the Missouri River joins it. For most of the following century it was the place where everything going west was organised, financed and supplied, and the Gateway Arch on the riverfront was built to say exactly that. At 630 feet it is the tallest arch in the world, and the tram that carries visitors up inside its hollow legs is one of the stranger rides in American tourism.

Forest Park, larger than Central Park, was the site of the 1904 World's Fair and of the Olympic Games held in the same summer, and the institutions left behind on its grounds still function: an art museum, a history museum, a science centre and a zoo, most of them free to enter. The symphony orchestra is among the oldest in the country. The neighbourhoods carry their origins in their names and their food, from the Italian streets of The Hill to the Bosnian bakeries and cafes of the south side, and the brewing industry that made the city famous still occupies a large stretch of riverfront real estate.

The modern economy is built on healthcare, plant and agricultural science, finance, logistics and a growing federal geospatial presence, and sport is close to a civic religion here, particularly baseball. The city is also unusually well set up for newcomers, with a long institutional habit of resettlement that is precisely why the Bosnian community grew here rather than somewhere else. That habit is the direct reason this page has anything specific to say.