Forty-Eight Hours, a Purchase Order, and an Illegible Stamp

Translate the whole page, and put the scope dispute in writing - immediately.

Reasoning:

1. Function controls. This document goes to a respondent whose probation is at stake. The caption identifies the court and case; the certificate of service establishes that he was given notice and when; the notary's jurat establishes that someone swore to something. Omitting them produces a document that looks like a letter and reads like a threat, and the reader cannot tell who issued it or whether service was proper.
2. A translation is a translation of the document, not of a paragraph. Partial translation is legitimate only when the client genuinely wants an excerpt and knows what is being left out - and the translator labels it as an excerpt.
3. You cannot silently comply and you cannot silently refuse. Reply in writing before the deadline: "I will translate the full page. If you require body text only, please confirm in writing that the caption, certificate of service, and jurat are excluded at your direction and will be identified as untranslated in the delivered file."
4. Keep the email. If the respondent later claims he never knew a hearing was set, the scope decision is the translator's exposure, not the agency's.

Constraint acknowledged: forty-eight hours is tight. Scope creep is not solved by cutting content the reader needs; it is solved by flagging the conflict early.

Neither gets resolved by guessing.

The date. "3/4/24" is 4 March in most of the world and 3 April in the United States. The source document is ambiguous, and you do not know which the writer meant. Options, in order of preference:

1. Preserve and flag. Render as it appears and add a translator's note: "Source reads 3/4/24; month/day order not specified."
2. If notes are prohibited by the client, leave the numeral in its original form and raise the ambiguity by email to the requesting party. Do not convert it to "4 de marzo" or "3 de abril" - that is inventing a fact in a document about a deadline.
3. Never silently normalize to the U.S. convention, even if the document is from a U.S. agency. The stakes are a missed hearing.

The illegible word. Mark it [ilegible] in brackets at the point of occurrence. Do not reconstruct it from context, do not render a plausible word, and do not omit it so the sentence reads smoothly. A stamp crossing text is exactly the situation where a confident guess is worse than a visible gap - the reader can ask about a gap; he cannot detect a fabricated word.

You attest to your translation, and to nothing else.

• Your certificate covers the text you translated: that it is a complete and accurate translation of the attached source document into Spanish, that you are competent in both languages, and the date and your signature. Nothing about the truth of the notice, the respondent's guilt, or the validity of the underlying order.
• The notary's jurat is content. You translate the jurat and the signature block as text. You do not sign it, do not fill in blanks, and do not notarize anything - and if asked to "just sign where the notary signed," refuse and explain that the jurat belongs to the person who swore, not to the translator.
• The statute citation stays as a citation. Translate the descriptive words around it, keep the section number in its original form, and do not add the statute's text or a summary of it.
• Refuse to certify anything you did not do: no "certified true copy," no attestation that the translation may be used in court without further foundation, no backdating to meet the Thursday deadline.

Why: the certificate is the one part of your work that carries legal weight independent of the words. Overstating it converts a translation problem into a sworn false statement.