Translation & transcreation www.ahmedmanzoor.com
Marathi translation

Marathi is not Hindi in a different hat

Marathi into English, chiefly evidentiary and civil registry work: Maharashtra certificates, court documents and records, translated personally and certified for filing in the United States.

Direction
Marathi into EnglishWhere the record and the demand both are.
Script
DevanagariSame script as Hindi. Different language underneath.
Certified
YesSigned certificate of accuracy accepted by USCIS.
Typical job
Under 500 wordsMost civil registry documents fall inside the $50 minimum.

Marathi and Hindi are written in the same script, which is exactly why Marathi goes wrong so often. An agency with no Marathi translator on the roster will hand a Marathi birth certificate to a Hindi translator, on the reasoning that the letters are the same. The letters are the same. Almost nothing else is.

What actually differs

Marathi has three grammatical genders where Hindi has two, a case system Hindi does not use in the same way, and a large everyday vocabulary that a Hindi speaker will either not know or, worse, will recognise as a Hindi word that means something else. Verb agreement follows different rules. A Hindi translator reading Marathi produces something fluent and confidently wrong, which is the most expensive kind of wrong on an evidentiary document.

If you are filing a translation with a court or with USCIS, the risk is not that it reads badly. It is that a name, a date, a relationship or a place is rendered from a Hindi reading of a Marathi word, and the document no longer says what the original says.

What I am usually sent

Birth, death and marriage certificates from Maharashtra. School leaving certificates and mark sheets. Affidavits, land and property records, and court orders. Chargesheets and their supporting documents, which are the same evidentiary problem at greater length. Clinical back translation, where a Marathi instrument has to be checked against its English source.

Most of these are short. A certificate is a few hundred words, falls inside the $50 minimum, and comes back the same week with a signed certificate of accuracy on letterhead carrying my ATA membership number.

Handwriting and stamps

Older Maharashtra registry documents are part printed and part handwritten, stamped over, and photographed rather than scanned. The translation problem is often a reading problem first. Send the clearest image you have, and if a field is genuinely illegible I will mark it illegible on the certificate rather than guess, because a guessed date on a certified translation is worse than an acknowledged gap.

What it costs. From $0.14 a source word for medical and legal work, from $0.12 for everything else, with a $50 minimum on anything up to 500 words. Certified documents are quoted on sight of a scan. The full rate sheet and the Trados match grid are public, because a rate you have to ask for is a rate that moves depending on who is asking.

Send the document, or tell me the deadline

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