I am a certified translator with the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) (Membership number 00024532), a Chartered Linguist with the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) (CIOL number: 72852), and a member of the American Translators Association (ATA) (Member number: 273323).
Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) is the only UK-based membership association providing a professional home for practising translators, interpreters and all those involved in supplying language services.
CIOL (Chartered Institute of Linguists) is the UK’s Royal Charter body for language professionals and linguists.
RexTrans provides chinese certified translation services on GOV.UK for British nationals in China.
The American Translators Association (ATA) is the largest professional association of translators and interpreters in the United States with nearly 8,500 members in more than 100 countries.
If you are claiming asylum or humanitarian protection in the UK and your evidence is in Chinese, none of it counts until it is in English. The Home Office works from an English file, and the immigration tribunal expects foreign-language documents to be filed with a translation. I translate asylum evidence from Chinese as an ITI-certified translator: £30 per page of 250 words, certified and signed, normally back within 24 hours, with notarisation available as an add-on in the rare case a representative asks for it. Solicitors, legal aid firms and applicants working without representation all instruct me directly.
An asylum bundle is never one document. A typical file that reaches me mixes:
The most important thing I do with this material is refuse to improve it. A summons that is vague in Chinese stays vague in English. A handwritten letter that reads awkwardly keeps its awkwardness. A stamp that is half-legible is marked as illegible rather than guessed at, and a passage I cannot read is flagged, not filled in. Credibility findings have turned on the wording of a single document, and a translator who tidies the source hands the other side an argument that the document is not what it claims to be.
Vocabulary carries real weight in these cases. Chinese law separates 行政拘留 (administrative detention) from 刑事拘留 (criminal detention), and both from the historical 劳动教养 (re-education through labour) and 收容教育. 取保候审 is release on bail pending trial, not parole. 传唤 is a summons to attend; 拘传 is compulsory attendance. Collapsing any of these into “detained by the police” removes precisely the detail that establishes what happened to someone. Religious terminology needs the same care — 家庭教会 (house church), the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and the group labels that appear in official Chinese documents — which I render consistently and annotate where the Chinese label is itself a contested characterisation.
Consistency across the bundle is the other half of the work. One spelling of a person’s name, one village, one police station and one date convention across forty documents, so a caseworker or a judge reading them in sequence sees a single story rather than several. I build a glossary for each case, mirror the spelling already used on Home Office correspondence or an ARC card rather than inventing a fresh romanisation, and keep the layout close enough to the original that anyone can hold the two side by side. Where a deadline is tight, my note on how long certified Chinese translation takes gives realistic timescales for larger bundles.
These are sensitive papers about people at risk, and they are handled accordingly: not shared, not used as samples, not passed on. Where a document is missing a page, or is plainly a photograph of a photograph, I say so rather than working around it quietly.
For a quote, send the whole bundle at once with a note of the deadline, the spelling of the applicant’s name as it appears on Home Office correspondence, and who the translation is for. I will tell you which documents need full certified translation and which are duplicates you should not be paying for, then confirm the page count and price before starting.
The Seal for Your Official Document
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Certified translations are often required for official purposes such as submissions to UK universities, courts, government agencies, and more.
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According to GOV.UK, your document must be certified by a professional or a person well-respected in your community (‘of good standing’). The person you ask should not be:
– Related to you
– Living at the same address
– In a relationship with you
In practice, UK authorities tend to recognize documents certified by authoritative translators, which can reduce the risk of rejection and save you time. You can minimize errors, omissions, or rejection by using a translator or translation company affiliated with a recognized professional body, such as the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), or the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL).
Usually yes, and handwritten material makes up a large share of this work — police notices, hospital notes, letters from village committees and churches. Where a character or a passage genuinely cannot be read, I mark it as illegible in place rather than guessing, and I tell you where those gaps fall when I hand the work over. A guessed word in an asylum document is a liability: if it later proves wrong, the whole document can be questioned. Photograph the paper flat, in daylight, without a flash, and far less will be lost.
Send everything and I will tell you what is worth translating. Asylum bundles routinely contain duplicates, envelopes, blank reverse sides and repeated copies of the same identity page, and there is no reason to pay for those. What does need full certified translation is anything a caseworker or a judge will rely on, translated in full rather than in extract, because partial translations of evidence attract exactly the sort of questions you want to avoid. You get a page count and a price for the material that matters before I begin.
The price starts from GBP30.
Our rates vary depending on the complexity and length of the document as well as the required turnaround time. We provide a free, no-obligation quote upon reviewing your document, ensuring that you know exactly what the translation will cost before proceeding.
The number of pages for certified translations is determined by the total word count of the document. A single page is considered to be 250 words or fewer, including any numerical data.
If a page exceeds 250 words, we will adjust the calculation accordingly based on the word count. At that point, you will need to request a quote from us.
Find out more about how pages are calculated.
The process begins with you sending us a scan or a clear photograph of your document. We then translate the document and provide a certification statement that attests to the accuracy of the translation and the qualifications of the translator. The certified translation is then stamped with our official seal and mailed to you.
WeChat threads and screenshots, yes — they turn up constantly in these cases, and I translate them with timestamps, sender names and any Chinese interface text preserved so the sequence stays intelligible. Voice notes and video need transcription first, which is a separate step and priced separately, so tell me if you have any and I will quote for it. Please send screenshots as image files rather than photographs of a screen, and do not crop them: a cropped thread loses the context that makes it evidence at all.
Yes. I work on this material myself. It is not passed to agencies, subcontractors or public machine translation platforms, and it is never reused as a sample or an example. Files are kept only for as long as I need them to finish the work and answer any follow-up query from your representative, and deleted on request. If your solicitor wants a written confidentiality confirmation before instructing me, ask and I will provide one before you send anything.
If you still have questions that are not covered here, feel free to reach out to me directly.