Guides · 2026-09-09
Certified translation does not need a scanner. It needs a legible image of the whole document. The difference between an order delivered in ten minutes and one that goes to manual review — or comes back with a query — is almost always the photo, not the document.
1. Daylight, no flash. Flash produces a hot spot exactly in the middle of the page. Indirect daylight near a window is the best light most people have. Overhead room lights cast your own shadow across the page; step to the side of the light rather than under it.
2. Straight down, flat. Put the document on a table and hold the phone parallel above it, not at an angle. Photographing at an angle distorts the text and, on documents with columns and tables — bank statements, transcripts, family registers — makes it genuinely ambiguous which value belongs to which row.
3. Fill the frame. The document should occupy nearly the whole image. A certificate photographed from a metre away on a large desk becomes a small object in a big picture, and the fine print stops being fine print and starts being a smudge.
4. The whole page, edges included. Registry references, act numbers and issue dates live at the very top and bottom. A photo cropped to "the important bit" usually cuts off exactly the identifiers that make the record traceable.
5. Right way up. A surprising share of unreadable uploads are simply rotated ninety degrees. Check the thumbnail before you upload.
6. Unfold it. Documents kept folded for years have a crease running through the text, and the paper curves away from the camera on both sides of the fold. Flatten it under a book for an hour first if you can. If the document is one physical sheet folded in half with content on all four faces, photograph each face separately and upload them as separate pages.
Modern certificates are printed on guilloche stock: fine coloured line patterns, watermarks, holograms. In poor light the camera fights the pattern and the typed text washes out into it. Brazilian Casa da Moeda certificates, Italian civil records and most European diplomas all do this.
Two fixes: more light, and less angle. Move to a window. Turn the flash off. If a hologram sits over text, shift your position slightly so the reflection lands on a blank area instead.
Handwritten registry entries — many Haitian, Polish, Romanian and pre-1990 records — are read by a person here rather than guessed at, and delivery is within 24 hours instead of minutes. You see that routing before you pay, not after.
For those, the photo matters more, not less. Faded ink needs even light across the whole page, not a bright patch in the centre. If a passage is genuinely unreadable, we mark it as illegible rather than inventing text — an honest gap is easier for an officer to deal with than a confident wrong name.
Upload each physical page as its own image. Pricing is per page, and a single tall image containing four pages stitched together is billed as one page but is not one page — which means it either gets flagged before delivery or, worse, delivers a document that does not match what you paid for. If your document runs to several pages, add them one at a time; the running total updates as you go.
The system checks legibility before you pay and tells you which route your order is taking. If it cannot read the page with confidence, it says so at that point — while you can still take a better photo, and before any money has changed hands.