Twenty-One Pages of Mandarin Judgments for a New Zealand High Court Affidavit

This case study is deliberately stripped of everything that could identify the matter. The client is referred to only as the instructing firm. No party, court, case reference or subject matter appears, and the litigation is described no more specifically than as two related commercial matters. Nothing here is legal advice; the instructing firm made every decision about form and filing, as it should.

The enquiry that told us what it was before it said so

The enquiry came from a New Zealand law firm. It reached us through our hire a translator form, having arrived first on legal translation services in New Zealand – a path that, in our experience, means someone has read the service page, not found the exact thing they need described on it, and gone looking for a human.

It was a request for a quote, not an order. The details were sparse and precise in the way solicitors’ enquiries usually are: twenty-one pages, Mandarin Chinese into English, five judgments from the courts of the People’s Republic of China, spanning first instance, second instance and retrial across two related commercial matters. Certification: New Zealand courts. Purpose: filing in the New Zealand High Court. And then the line that changed everything about how we quoted it – the translation was to be affirmed as part of an affidavit.

Most enquiries that mention a court ask for a certified translation and leave it there. This one had already worked out that a certified translation was not what was wanted, and had told us the form the court work would actually take. That is rarer than it should be, and it is the reason this is worth writing up: the gap between “certified for court use” and “affirmed inside an affidavit” is the single most misunderstood thing in New Zealand legal translation, and it is not a technicality. It changes who signs, what gets attached to what, how the pages have to be put together, and – the part that surprises people most – who is allowed to do the translating.

What an affidavit wrapper actually is, and why it is not certification

Start from the thing New Zealand does not have. There is no sworn-translator system here. No government body appoints translators, stamps them with an official number and gives their signature standing in its own right. That absence is the hinge on which everything else turns.

In most of our work, the answer to the absence is a Certificate of Accuracy: a signed statement from the translator that the translation is complete and accurate, attached to the translation. It is produced by a business, it is signed by a person on the business’s behalf, and it travels with the document as a companion piece. Immigration New Zealand, the Department of Internal Affairs and NZQA are all satisfied by that arrangement, and it works because the authority’s question is “has a competent independent translator vouched for this?”.

A court’s question is different. A court does not accept documents on the strength of a company’s say-so. Evidence reaches a New Zealand court through a person, who makes a statement on oath or affirmation, and who can be made to answer for it. So the translation does not arrive at the court certified. It arrives inside something – an affidavit made by the translator, in which the translator personally affirms that they translated the documents and that the translation is true and complete, with the translation and the source documents annexed as exhibits to that affidavit.

The translation, in other words, stops being a product with a certificate attached and becomes evidence given by a witness. That reframing has consequences, and they are worth taking one at a time.

Who signs changes from a company to a person

A Certificate of Accuracy can sensibly be signed by whoever did the work, under the business’s name, with the business standing behind it. An affidavit cannot. An affidavit is made in the first person by a named individual who swears or affirms to its contents. The deponent is the translator, personally. The business is not a party to it and cannot stand in its place.

That means the translator’s own standing has to be stated in the affidavit itself – their competence in the language pair, their qualifications, their experience of this kind of material. There is no accreditation stamp to point at, so the affidavit has to do the work of establishing why this person’s translation should be relied on. In our draft that paragraph sets out the translator’s qualifications, and it was written in consultation with the instructing firm, because what a court will want to see there is a matter for the lawyers, not for us.

It also means the translator is personally exposed in a way a certificate signatory is not. A deponent can, in principle, be required to answer questions about their affidavit. Everybody involved in a job like this should know that before the first page is translated, because it changes who should be doing it.

Who witnesses it is a different question from notarisation

Clients routinely assume that anything court-related needs a notary. For a document being used inside New Zealand, that is usually wrong and always more expensive than necessary.

An affidavit for use in a New Zealand proceeding is sworn or affirmed before a person authorised in New Zealand to take affidavits. A Justice of the Peace is the usual choice, and a JP is not a Notary Public – they do different jobs. A notary’s signature and seal exist to make a New Zealand document recognisable to an authority overseas, which is precisely what our notarised translation service is for. Here the document was going no further than Wellington. Notarisation would have added cost and no standing. The instructing firm, naturally, already knew this; we raise it because most clients do not, and buying notarisation for a domestic court filing is one of the commonest ways to waste money on translation.

What gets exhibited, and why the Mandarin has to go in too

The translation is annexed to the affidavit as an exhibit. So, as a matter of ordinary good practice, is the source material the translator worked from – because the deponent is affirming a relationship between two things, and a court cannot see a relationship if only one half of it is in front of it.

This has a very practical consequence for the bundle’s size, and it is one clients should hear at the quoting stage rather than at the filing stage. Twenty-one pages of source material does not mean twenty-one pages of exhibit. It means the Mandarin pages and the English pages, together, plus the affidavit itself, plus the certificates the witnessing officer signs on the exhibits. The instructing firm had allowed for this. Many clients have not, and the discovery arrives at the worst possible moment.

How the pages are referenced, so the deponent can point at them

This is the part where translation production and court practice actually touch, and it is the part a translation supplier is most likely to get wrong by being unhelpful rather than by being inaccurate.

The deponent has to be able to identify, precisely and permanently, what they are affirming. “The attached translation” is not good enough when the attachment is dozens of pages that could be separated, re-ordered or partially lost. So every page has to be uniquely and durably identifiable on its face, and the English pages have to correspond to the source pages in a way a reader can follow without being told how.

What that meant in practice: continuous page numbering across the whole translated set rather than each judgment restarting at one; each translated page identifying which source page it corresponds to, so that the two halves of the exhibit can be laid alongside each other; and page-for-page correspondence maintained even where it made the English look slightly airier than it needed to, because a reader who has to hunt for the matching page will eventually stop checking, and a reader who stops checking is a reader who has stopped trusting the document. We also kept the translated set in one continuous sequence rather than delivering five separate files, so that nothing in the bundle could be reassembled in the wrong order without it being obvious.

None of that is clever. It is just the recognition that the deponent will one day have to say “that page, there” and be right.

The constraint nobody expects: one translator for all twenty-one pages

Here is the thing that genuinely shaped the quote, and the thing we would want any firm in this position to understand before they ask three suppliers for a price.

Twenty-one pages across five documents is exactly the size of job a translation company would normally split. Hand two judgments to one translator and three to another, run them in parallel, reconcile the terminology at the end, deliver in half the time. It is the standard answer to a volume problem and it is a perfectly good answer for most work.

It is not available here. The deponent has to affirm that they translated the documents and that the translation is true and complete. One named person has to be able to own all twenty-one pages – not supervise them, not sign off on them, own them. A translator who affirms accuracy over pages a colleague produced is affirming something they cannot properly know, and the moment anyone looks closely at how the work was organised, the affidavit is worth less than the paper it is printed on.

So the work went to one translator, start to finish. A second internal reviewer read it, as everything we deliver is read, but the review was a check on the deponent’s own work rather than a share of it – which is a distinction worth stating out loud when a court filing depends on it.

That single decision drives everything else about a job like this. The constraint on delivery is not our capacity; it is one person’s calendar, plus an appointment to make the affirmation in front of a witnessing officer, which has to be scheduled and cannot be compressed. A quote that promises an aggressive turnaround on an affirmed translation of this size is either planning to split the work – in which case the affidavit is compromised – or has not understood the question. Our quote set out a realistic delivery window, and explained in the quote itself why the window was what it was. A firm comparing quotes should ask every supplier the same question: who, exactly, will be the deponent, and will that person have translated every page?

Rendering PRC judgments into English a New Zealand court can read

The language work had its own demands, separate from the wrapper. Two in particular are worth setting down.

The first is procedural posture. Chinese judicial decisions identify very clearly which stage of the process they come from – a decision at first instance, a decision on appeal, a decision on retrial – and in a set of five documents covering all three stages across two related matters, that labelling is the most load-bearing content on the page. An English reader needs to know, without inference, which decision is which. So the procedural stage is rendered precisely and consistently, and never dressed up in the nearest New Zealand term, because New Zealand’s appellate structure is not China’s and an English label borrowed from our system quietly tells the reader something untrue about the Chinese one.

The second is the family of document types. Chinese procedure distinguishes between instruments that an English speaker would lump together as “judgments” – the determination that disposes of the substance, and the various rulings and orders that deal with procedural matters along the way. Translating both as “judgment” because both came out of a court is the sort of smoothing that reads well and loses information. Each instrument type was rendered distinctly and the distinction held across all five documents, with the Chinese term retained in brackets at first use so that a reader who knows the system can confirm what they are looking at and a reader who does not is not misled.

Beyond that: official names, titles and formulaic closing language rendered rather than paraphrased; seals and signature blocks described in their position on the page, with legible text transcribed and anything illegible marked as illegible rather than reconstructed; and nothing summarised anywhere. The instructing firm asked, sensibly, whether only the operative portions could be translated to save cost. For some purposes that is a real option, and our selective translation service exists for exactly those purposes. For a document a deponent will affirm as true and complete and a court will read as evidence, we advised against it. A partial translation invites the question of what was left out and who chose, and that is not a question you want asked about your exhibit.

What was delivered

A complete English translation of all twenty-one pages, produced by a single translator, continuously paginated, in page-for-page correspondence with the source set, with translator’s notes covering seals, signatures and illegible elements. A draft affidavit paragraph setting out the translator’s competence and the basis of the translation, provided for the instructing firm to settle into its own document in its own form, because the affidavit is the firm’s instrument and not ours. The translator attended an appointment to affirm the affidavit before a witnessing officer in New Zealand, with the translation and the Mandarin source set exhibited to it.

It was delivered inside the agreed window, in the form the instructing firm needed for filing. The firm confirmed that the material went into the High Court complete and on time, and that nothing in the translated set or the affirmation was queried. What the Court does with the evidence is the Court’s, and no translation supplier has any business reporting on it.

If you are a New Zealand firm with foreign-language documents to file

Ask four questions at the outset and you will avoid almost every problem we see.

Is the translation being certified, or affirmed? If it is being affirmed, say so in the first email, because it changes the supplier’s entire production method and not just the paperwork at the end.

Who will the deponent be, and will that person have personally translated every page? If the answer is vague, or if the supplier offers to accelerate delivery by adding translators, you have your answer.

Is the source material going into the exhibit as well? Plan the bundle on that basis from the start.

And is anything in this file going overseas? If it is, the wrapper is different again – a notary rather than a JP – and it is worth separating the domestic and outbound parts of a matter before anyone starts stamping. We work through that distinction from the other side in our case study on a New Zealand document translated into Arabic for a reader overseas, and from the inbound side in the case study on a French civil-status record prepared for Immigration New Zealand, where a client had bought notarisation that the receiving authority never wanted.

For the language pair itself, our Chinese to English translation in New Zealand page covers the document families we handle most often, and the business translation services page covers the contractual and corporate material that tends to arrive alongside litigation documents.

The one sentence to take away: in a New Zealand court, the translation is not the thing that carries authority. The person who affirms it is. Build the job around that person from the first page, and everything else falls into place.