By Carlos de Paula, who has translated over 100,000 documents from over 50 countries and territories.
I still remember my first desktop scanner. It worked well, as far as scanning pages, but OCR in the 90s was still quite undeveloped, so OCR output was usually an abstract work of art when you tried to use it.
In the past few years, as technology improved, OCR, especially when converting certain types of PDF, has produced almost perfect documents.
Several new translation start-ups came into the scene and got the notion that reproducing originals as certified translations was the way to go. This disruption has made aesthetic appearance more important than actual content, and I have personally lost a few clients in the last few years, because I refuse to recreate originals as translations, with reproduction of country’s coat of arms, QR codes and even signatures.
It is not so much that there is a lot of work involved, it is actually easy to do if you got some PDF handling skills, which I do. The fact is that reproducing logos and even copyrighted forms without permission is a violation of U.S. and international law. Placing a scanned officer’s signature on a translation is also a violation of law, tantamount to forgery. Such misuse, I suppose, could be averted if authorization is obtained from the owners of logos, coats of arm, form copyright and signatures, but no one bothers to give such authorization. Not worth it for the pittance those companies charge, so the law gets violated, and the client is happy carrying with their law infringing document, even if there is no intent to defraud.
This is not done only by ruthless companies located offshore who care less about American law. In fact, some very large U.S. translation companies are doing this and widely publicizing it on their websites, for all to see.
I for one will continue to refuse to reproduce other people’s intellectual property and signatures on documents I prepare. To me documents that feature such reproductions look like forgery, and I am surprised nothing has been done by Federal agencies.
Carlos de Paula is one of the top Brazilian Portuguese translators in the USA since 1982. And now a top Portuguese AI Translation editor as well.
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