Translation & transcreation www.ahmedmanzoor.com
About

Thirty-six years, five languages

A sole practitioner rather than an agency. When a job needs more than one pair of hands, I assemble the people and stay accountable for the result.

I have been translating since June 1990. English into Urdu and Hindi, and Urdu, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati into English. Six working directions, three writing systems, one person doing the work.

What the work actually is

Most of it is regulated. Clinical informed consent forms, chargesheets and their supporting evidence, codes of conduct that people read before deciding whether to report something, and school curricula that a child will be taught from for six years. Documents where being approximately right is the same as being wrong.

The rest is closer to writing than to translating: campaign copy that has to work on someone who has never heard the English, interface strings that have to fit a button, and speech data that has to sound like how people actually talk rather than how they write.

Working alone, and not

I am a sole proprietor registered in New York State. There is no account team and no queue. You deal with the person doing the translation, which is the point.

Some work cannot be done alone. A clinical instrument needs two independent forward translations before anything can be reconciled, then a back translation, a clinician who practises in the target language, and patients who can say whether a question means what it is meant to mean. For that I bring in people I have worked with over three decades, brief them, run the steps, and answer for the outcome. Every one of them signs an NDA before they see anything. The full chain, step by step, and how confidentiality works.

Where I am, and why it matters

Depew, New York. A translator working these pairs from inside the United States is uncommon, and for American legal and medical buyers it is practical rather than sentimental: overlapping business hours, a domestic invoice, a W-9 rather than a W-8BEN, and somebody in the same time zone when a caseworker has a question about a certified translation.

The client list has run through agencies in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, Spain, Turkey and Egypt. I do not name the agencies. I would not name you to them either.

What I do not do

Subtitling and desktop publishing. I have done both and I am not the best person for either, so they are not offered. If you need them I would rather say so than take the work.

Verify any of it

On certification specifically: the ATA runs no certification exam in Hindi, Urdu, Marathi or Gujarati, so no translator working in these languages holds that credential. Active membership is the ceiling, and it is what I hold. Anyone advertising themselves as an ATA certified Hindi or Urdu translator is describing something that does not exist.

Education

Bachelor of Arts, University of Mumbai, 1981.

Curriculum vitae

Two pages, generated from the same record as this site so the two cannot drift apart. Language pairs, services, the full subject-field breakdown, selected work, tools, standing and terms.

Download the CV, PDF

Send the document, or tell me the deadline

Enquiries answered from Depew, New York. An NDA is available before anything is sent.