SWORN TRANSLATION AS LANGUAGE PRACTICE
- A sworn translation is sometimes informally called an “official translation” or a “certified translation”, but the correct term is “sworn translation”.
- Simply having a document stamped and signed at a police station, by a commissioner of oaths or by a lawyer does not make it a sworn translation.
- A sworn translator has sworn an oath in the High Court of South Africa to “translate faithfully and correctly, to the best of [their] knowledge and ability”.
- A sworn translation of a document is the legal equivalent of the original document for evidentiary purposes in a court of law.
- A sworn translation must have been translated by a sworn translator (or certified by one). Even a translator who has been accredited by SATI cannot produce a sworn translation unless they have also been through the process to become a sworn translator.
- To ensure that a translation is recognised as a sworn translation, sworn translators stamp and sign every page of their translations and add a statement certifying that it “is a true translation of the original”.
- Since a sworn translation is done for legal purposes, the translation should be clearly recognisable as the same document, with all the information as in the original, even if some of it seems unnecessary or repetitious.
- Sworn translators assume that every word and every nuance has a purpose, and reproduce the content, every signature, every stamp in the way they appear on the original.
- The list below gives examples of the types of documents that sworn translators may be called upon to translate:
o Birth certificates, educational certificates, marriage certificates, wills, orders of divorce, etc.