Translation services

Every organisation that translates finds out eventually whether the translation worked. A community worker in Fairfield reads the brochure aloud and stops halfway through. A nurse watches a patient sign a consent form they clearly haven't read. A campaign goes out in eleven languages and nothing moves.

Translation is the part of the work that looks finished when it isn't. The file comes back, the script is right, the layout holds. Whether the meaning survived is a separate question, and it's the only one that counts.

We've been answering that question since 2011, across 171 languages and a vetted network of more than 10,000 translators. Sometimes it's one birth certificate for a partner visa. Sometimes it's a decade-long program across 550 services. The standard doesn't move.

What we translate

Four kinds of work, and they ask different things of us.

• Certified documents. Birth and marriage certificates, academic transcripts, police checks, statutory declarations. Signed and stamped by a NAATI certified translator so Home Affairs, a court, a registry or a university accepts them without a second look. Start at birth certificate translation to see how a single document runs.
• Public information. Patient information sheets, consent forms, discharge instructions, tenancy agreements, safety notices, entitlement letters. High stakes, no tolerance for ambiguity, and almost always written for a reader with more health or legal literacy than the actual reader has.
• Campaign and creative. Where word-for-word stops working and transcreation starts. A tagline that survives translation intact usually wasn't doing much in English either.
• Digital and technical. Websites, apps, e-learning modules, tender responses, policy, technical manuals. Returned in the format you work in, not as a Word file someone has to re-key at 11pm.

Certification, and what it actually tells you

Two credentials get used as though they're the same thing. They aren't, and the difference shows up in procurement.

NAATI certified describes a person. An individual passes testing and is certified for one language pair in one direction. Certified Vietnamese into English is not certified English into Vietnamese. What NAATI certification covers.

NAATI endorsed describes an organisation. LEXIGO is a NAATI endorsed language service provider, LSP950085, which recognises that we engage certified practitioners and meet NAATI's standards for how work is assigned, checked and delivered. Why that matters on a tender.

You need certification for visa and citizenship applications, court and tribunal evidence, university admission, professional registration and most government submissions. You don't need it for a campaign, a newsletter, a website or a community fact sheet. Buying it there gets you a stamp, not better writing.

Quality is a process, not an adjective

Every provider says their translation is accurate. ISO 17100 is the standard that makes the claim checkable: a second qualified linguist revises every translation before it's delivered, and the revision is documented. We hold it, with ISO 27001 for information security and ISO 9001 for quality management. What the three certifications cover.

Underneath sits the unglamorous infrastructure that decides whether your fifth translation matches your first. A translation memory stores every segment we've translated for you. A termbase locks the terms you can't afford to see drift: the legal name of a program, the way an entitlement is described, the word a community actually uses for a service rather than the word the department uses. Three years on, a new translator inherits every decision the last one made.

It also brings the price down. Repeated content is matched against your memory instead of retranslated, so a document set that's 40 per cent boilerplate is quoted as one.

When the deadline is the constraint

In 2020 the Department of Home Affairs needed critical health information in front of communities that English-language broadcast wasn't reaching. We mobilised more than 180 professionals and delivered over 200 pieces of content across 63 languages, reaching more than 250,000 people a year. How that ran.

Surge capacity isn't something you can promise on the day it's needed. It comes from a standing network across 171 languages, memories and glossaries already built, and project managers who know which translator to call on a Friday night.

Where translation isn't the answer

Sometimes a translation fails because the English was never going to survive it. Sentences built for a policy audience. Idioms with no equivalent. A call to action that quietly assumes a Medicare card, a myGov login and a printer.

Translating harder won't fix that. Multicultural communication rebuilds the message for the audience instead of converting it. Multicultural research tells you what the audience is responding to before the budget is committed. Language technology keeps all of it in sync once it's live.